I like it. It'd be nice if the background was a touch transparent to make the lens flair more effective.
One problem with this skin, as with a lot of others with clickable text and characters, is that the user can click and miss too easily. The text itself is the button but not the buts in between such as inside the 'U' in pause.
I hadn't thought of making the background transparent. It might look good. Unfortunately, the lens flare is a destructive filter on the background layer, so I can't make the background transparent without doing the same to the lens flare.
I'm aware of the problems with the buttons. Hence my first 'Left to do' item
Thanks for the input.
@KEV-O: Thanks for the input. I'm keeping the lens flare though - it's just a plain background without it & I've grown to liking the flare Thanks though.
one of the things i noticed on the progress sliders with Xion is that it treats the progress slider as pixels, if thers no sliderbit then it will only use the 1 pixel thickness you have ther, which can be somewhat unwieldy/easily controllable
i would also go with the shadow on the indis/buttons to match the ticker/timer text or remove it, but at least keep all the text the same style, it looks kinda odd with it not all the same
I agree the text looks a little odd, but that's because of the way Xion anti-aliases text. I could make the buttons/indis look that fuzzy too, but it didn't really look good.
I see what you mean by handling the progress bars. I hadn't thought of that actually - I usually just click & drag the cursor to seek, rather than click at points along the bar. I'll poke around & see if I can come up with something.
Now, the button "problem." I encountered this one myself and here's how I fixed it in my skins:
1) Create a layer above or below the "play" text (or whatever button text you need)
2) Make a rectangular selection around the text - large enough to be a reasonable click region
3) Fill that selection with black or white - in the case of your skin, I'd make it black just in case.
4) Set that layer's transparency level to 1%
5) Make a new layer below it and merge
6) Set the merged layer transparency to 1% (actually, 50% would be adequate)
7) Merge this layer with the button (text) layer
Now the button layer retains its transparency around the letters of the text and also has a clickable region that doesn't depend solely upon the visible pixels in the text.
Again, fantastic job - especially on the play indicator animation.
============== EDIT ================
OMG! I just looked at the PSD for your skin and saw how you accomplished the play indi animation - and I laughed that "I actually understand this - how incredibly clever" laugh. Genius, Pickle, genius!
Edit: It seems my FTP program doesn't overwrite files, so the new version is not online. I'll upload it tonight. Sorry about that.
Thanks to the addition of indi_local and indi_web in build 65, I'm able to have the progress bar only show up when playing a local file, & a similar effect for the network buffer.
I've got a couple problems though. I added a sliderbit like SLoB suggested. However, for some reason the bits are shifted up 1 pixel above the center of their respective bar. Would you folks be able to take a look & see why?
2nd problem. When in the full mode & wanting to go to the mini mode, I'm supposed to click the little triangle at the top of the skin. Unfortunately, this just re-loads the full mode. When i click a similar button while in mini mode, I go to full mode just fine. Again, can anyone point out where I'm going wrong?
Thanks ~harkonnen. I'm not called a genius enough
Last edited by pickle on January 4th, 2007, 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
try harkonnens example above for the sliders instead of using sliderbits, that way you get to keep the 1 pixel line but the area for capture is bigger, works a treat
pickle Wrote:I've got a couple problems though. I added a sliderbit like SLoB suggested. However, for some reason the bits are shifted up 1 pixel above the center of their respective bar. Would you folks be able to take a look & see why?
This looks like a bug, I will fix fix it for the next release
pickle Wrote:2nd problem. When in the full mode & wanting to go to the mini mode, I'm supposed to click the little triangle at the top of the skin. Unfortunately, this just re-loads the full mode. When i click a similar button while in mini mode, I go to full mode just fine. Again, can anyone point out where I'm going wrong?
This is because your zip contains a folder and the skin files within that folder. You need to zip the files up, and not include the folder. Otherwise Xion cannot find the filename when it searches the zip, as the filename is no longer Mini.psd, but Suave/Mini.psd instead.The easiest way to fix it is to use something like Winzip or Powerarchiver and zip just the files and not the entire folder path as well.