Skinning basics


      This section covers some basic concepts that will help you better understand the skin creation process. Skinning is all the rage in a great deal of today's computer software - from the early days of skinnable media players to today's skinnable operating systems. The process of skinning allows you to quickly design and brand your application's interface. Application individual components, such as buttons, checkboxes, scrollbars, menu bars can be changed in these same ways via the skinning mechanism. Thus, skinning can have an impressive effect on what the application looks like, and more importantly, on how it functions. When designing a skin for your application, you can opt to make subtle changes or go all-out and radically affect its appearance - it's up to you!


      Skinning is historically a laborious, time intensive process. It is going to take several phases.

1. Skin design

            Primarily you will need a powerful graphics editing software for skin design elaboration. It can be widespread Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw, PaintShop even free GIMP editor which can provide various graphical effects for creating images including semi-transparency support.

2. Skin assembling

      Installed SkinBuilder is an indispensable condition for skin assembling process. Skin assembling requires individual approach to details that make skin structure corresponding to your tastes.

3. Program code integration

        If you want to skin your own application you should implement specific methods in your original source code and thus you integrate SkinCrafter library. It allows you to create unique looking style application and fully interactive user interface by means of programming.

       SkinCrafter presents multiskin support that allows you to use two and more different skins for an application skinning. In other words you can use different .skf files in the same time for your interface skinning. For example you can skin one dialog window with Azurix.skf and another window of the same application with Stylish.skf.


      This manual will examine you how to create skins. You'll see several sections containing intricate screenshots with a lot of options, other are simple and self explanatory. Do not worry about those. The separate sections of the Skinning Guide will explain in detail what these options do, what they are for, and how to use them to your advantage.
                    

 

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