Question For Cliff

[Lance]

Hey buddy.

I'm just curious here, how did you go about starting to manipulate a PSD file into a skinable application? I think you're a pure genious for doing it, but did you recieve any help from Adobe for breaking down the file and it's data? Also, what language is it written in. I'm just really curious on how you started the whole thing, what the first steps were.

Peace, Lance

[SLoB]

not to put words into Cliff's mouth or take away from his inspiration but

c++ for language
there are adobe sdk/sources for psd, the current codebase is based on ps7 i believe

Cliff can fill you in on his dream heheh

[Cliff Cawley]

Hey buddy.

I'm just curious here, how did you go about starting to manipulate a PSD file into a skinable application? I think you're a pure genious for doing it, but did you recieve any help from Adobe for breaking down the file and it's data? Also, what language is it written in. I'm just really curious on how you started the whole thing, what the first steps were.

Peace, Lance

Hey Lance,

I answered this in the Developer Interview that WinCustomize did, but basically it was after talking to an artist friend. He was never able to use any skin editor I made, so in the end I asked him what he'd prefer. He said photoshop. So I came up with an easy way of using just photoshop

As for the File format, I used the PSD documentation from version 3.0 of the format and then had an update for version 6.0 from the SDK. Since then I believe Adobe locked the SDK away as a separate purchase. Anything further than that was just trial and error and many hours of debugging

Xion is written in C++ using pure Win32 API calls. You can easily read PSDs in other languages, its just the file format you have to understand.

Cliff