3rd party skinning apps/solutions - what do you use?

[mskuma]

FLStudio looks excellent - it's a good example where I think it makes perfect sense from a UI point of view to skin it as they did..

[Fangbeast]

Trond said "Don't skin. It's ugly, slow and less functional" and I don't know if that's hie experience or a personal bias but I have found that it is simply not true as evidenced by more than one example in the forums and in the commercial world.

The simplest example I can give is one product that merely uses system theme overriding gradient colours to give itself a great, simple interface (no complex bitmap graphics). MediaMonkey.

I can't see any of your gradients here. Either it's completely skinned or it uses some ugly mix of non-skinned mode and custom-draw mode to look like a normal Windows applications (fails miserably). I don't need a program that takes multiple seconds to quit and 30 mb of ram just to play my mp3s. There's also more than a "great" look, namely functionality. MediaMonkey cannot be used without a mouse, for example. Sure, keyboard navigation is not impossible nor even hard to make for skinned applications, however, the fact remains, that skinned applications almost never implements this properly.

1. It skins just fine if you pay attention during the install when you ask it to override the default system theming (or words to that effect).
2. It hardly takes any RAM here to do what it does and looks attractive.
3. It doesn't use 30meg of ram here.
4. As we go towards the future, mouse applications are the standard. Keyboard control is almost as dead as my underwear, even if I personally like keyboard control as well.

Everyone's system and preferences are different. Here it works well, fast and looks great. And customers being what they are (fickle beasts), they will always dictate what we write, no matter what our personal preferences are.

mksuma has an extremely valid point and to that I wish to add. As a programmer and educator for over 26 years, I have found that a properly skinned application (memory wastage and all!!) will lead and teach the user far better and MORE EFFECTIVELY draw their attention into using the application than a non skinned one. A bare, minimalistic interface is one that people will walk away from, no matter how cheap on memory it is or how super fast it is.

[Trond]

Trond, go get FLStudio 6. All of it has great keyboard navigation etc etc.
Other software; Winamp.

Much more too

Many VST's too. SOME skinned app's are skinned bad. Some are not.

Winamp has very bad (much, but bad) keyboard support. It has many keyboard shortcuts, however, how can you find out about them? The help file does not give any matches when I search on keyboard, and it is actually online, a pain for dialup users. The context menu key to get the context menu doesn't work. In other words, you need a mouse to find the keyboard shortcuts. How clever is that?

[ricardo]

Edit: The usual, easiest and most flexible way is though to create a borderless window and draw the "title bar" on the client area.

I don't think so.

Its not easiest, not that flexible and the result is not the better unless you are a real artist. In most cases i saw in internet, IMHO this kind of approach gives 'amateur like' results.

[Trond]

Edit: The usual, easiest and most flexible way is though to create a borderless window and draw the "title bar" on the client area.

I don't think so.

Its not easiest, not that flexible and the result is not the better unless you are a real artist. In most cases i saw in internet, IMHO this kind of approach gives 'amateur like' results.

Like Winamp?

[Shannara]

Do a search on Skunksoft on these forums, they have been working on a skinning lib for PB applications for a year and 8 months then the company died or something, havent heard a peep from none of their company members ...

Reference: http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtop ... light=skin

[mskuma]

Do a search on Skunksoft on these forums .. and died

Thanks. Yeah I noticed that - but didn't include it in the list for that reason. Seemed like a shame - looked as though it had some momentum.

[Zizaco]

[Joakim Christiansen]

Okay, pictures without any description... What are you trying to show us here exactly? Did you develop this skinning engine yourself?

[ricardo]

One thing is making a shape and use images as gadgets and a very different approach (the real skinning imho) is to use the SAME gadgets (button, combobox, etc) but with a differemt skin or theme.

The second coice is what AppFace does... are there any other solution to do this same way?