Snow

[Young Twig]

It's done. I know you've all been waiting for it and pissing yourselves over it...

http://twig.thepointyouth.com/crap/snow.png

[maresias]

The corner you have seperated for resizing,I guess,looks transparent in the current release.(I am not using the DB)But It looks like a wonderful artistic square-out corner so no problem.I first thought it was an original addendum.If only u could continue that black border line around [on the main body] the map of the resizer square.Then It will look just as killer for the people who use the release ,and be ready for them when they upgrade to the next release.And quit that act and just upload it,will ya?
Then see what's happening.

[Young Twig]

just upload it,will ya?

I wish I could. :(

[greatfujimori]

It's a great skin overall, I really like it - a few suggestions, though -

Make the playlist resizeable horizontally - as it is, I can only stretch it vertically.

Make the color scheme apply to more than just the bar displaying the Artist / Title.

Make it so pressing the playlist or EQ button a second times closing the playlist or EQ. As it is, I have to press the "close" button, but it's easier just to press the playlist button again.

The font in the system messages window is a bit blurred / unclear.

Overall really great job though!

[plover]

Looks pretty nice, but I have a few UI quibbles:

The extension buttons (eq etc.) on the main player do not close the extensions.

I don't think having buttons labelled 'close' is a good idea, especially as it is not done on all extensions. This falls under the UI principle of being careful when messing with users' expectations.

Ditto for horizontal scroll bars that scroll an area vertically.

Just as an illustration here is the process I went through looking at the skin:
When I brought up the skin, I clicked on 'equalizer'. Then clicked on it a few more times trying to get it to close; then I noticed the 'x' close button on the eq. Next I opened the playlist, and, (being human :) ), clicked 'playlist' to try and close it. I then, based on previous experience with the eq, looked for an x button. The last place my eye would look would be in a row of identically formatted buttons "obviously" dealing with playlist features. Then, finding a button labelled 'close', I have to stop and ask myself whether it closes the playlist, instead of being a button for a command I don't usually use. I can only convince myself of this by concluding that there is nothing else on the interface that has any chance of closing the playlist. Note that all this scrutiny requires more patience than most users will have with an unknown interface.

Balancing issues like these with aesthetics is always a judgement call, but the principles I'm applying here are pretty much core tenets of UI design.

FWIW here's are my suggestions if the use of word-labelled (as opposed to symbol-labelled) controls is an important aesthetic goal for the skin:

In general, the main principle to apply to anything unusual in a UI is consistency. It would be better if every button, in the interface were word-labelled including all close boxes, and scroll bar buttons (perhaps the scroll down button could be 'dn' for symmetry with 'up'. To provide visual clues for the user you could have lightly colored symbols behind the letters of buttons about which users have special expectations (eg. close, scroll bars), or at least a different color background so that UI controls are differentiated from application controls. Using word-labels might be extended even to the resize tabs, but I'm not quite sure how. (The resize tab as it stands is mildly confusing as it looks, by both position and symbology, as if it ought to resize in both dimensions. The two solutions that come to mind are: an up/down arrow symbol in the bottom left, or a narrow strip across the bottom of the playlist so that it can be grabbed like the bottom of a more usual resizable window.)

You could also tell me I'm an interfering nuisance and so I should just shut up... :D

Also (and alas), there is a bug, but I'm not sure whether it's due to the skin or to QCD:

If you resize the playlist then open the encoder, doing a resize on the playlist or scrolling the playlist while the encoder is open produces seriously screwy effects. Perhaps resizable extensions aren't meant to be overlapping or vice-versa?

But seriously folks...
for all my cavils, it's a pretty cool skin (no pun intended).

[maresias]

The extension buttons (eq etc.) on the main player do not close the extensions.
Actually,they do close in the release (4.11) and it works perfectly.
so,it should be sth with the developement build,sorry.

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

Awesome skin! It has a resizable playlist and a graphic analyzer. :D But its also still very buggy :( For instance when i display the encoder, it puts itself ontop of the playlist and cant be moved away. then when i try to resize the playlist longer everything becomes a blurry mess of black lines running everywhere.

Fix those bugs and i may make it my default player ;)

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

...player, i mean skin

of course

[ace2701]

It's done. I know you've all been waiting for it and pissing yourselves over it...

VERY NICE Young Twig! Well worth the wait. One minor suggestion (for my artistic taste), the lower part of the playlist could match the curves in the upper part of the main skin. Either way, a job well done :) .

[Young Twig]

Actually,they do close in the release (4.11) and it works perfectly.
so,it should be sth with the developement build,sorry.
They close when you double click them. I can't control that. That's all QCD.

I don't think I can make it horizontally resizable... It would be mad ghetto.

No extensions are draggable. I didn't think anyone would want them draggable. If they were dragged away from the player they would have a border on 3 sides only. I might make the encoder draggable so that you can put it under the playlist.

Equalizer says "X" because close is nowhere near fitting in that small space. Maybe I will make the eq things smaller and put preset buttons underneath, but I doubt it... That would require me redoing all the eq crap, exporting more buttons, etc. I'm lazy and I just want to be done with skin.

About resizing of encoder and playlist. This again is not my fault. I have NO control over this. This is a QCD bug. If you keep them the same size, it should stay nice. If the skin freezes because of this (it has done it to me) hit F5.

[Young Twig]

VERY NICE Young Twig! Well worth the wait. One minor suggestion (for my artistic taste), the lower part of the playlist could match the curves in the upper part of the main skin. Either way, a job well done :) .
That shape (the rounded upper and not rounded bottom) is what I based the entire skin off of. :D

Make the color scheme apply to more than just the bar displaying the Artist / Title.
That's kinda the point. Since it is called Snow.

[ace2701]

That shape (the rounded upper and not rounded bottom) is what I based the entire skin off of. :D


In that case, I think it came out great ;) .

[Young Twig]

In that case, I think it came out great ;) .
cool.

Finally, someone who doesn't ask for something that is impossible...

[regener8ed]

YT; i made some changes to give behaviour closer to what i think you were intending. there are still some painting issues with QCD that yields less-than-perfect results when stretching, but F5 usually corrects that.

the major changes are:

-removal of the stretching control and close button for the encoder extension: instead leave these blank and use the controls from the playlist extension below. also, theoretically you should set the encoder extension to on-top priority so it doesn't get shuffled to the back when using the controls on the playlist extension, but with the painting issues things actually seem to work better without it.
-put a one-pixel border around all controls on the overlapping extension to help QCD know where to render and associate the controls better.
-added some statements to the skinfamily.ini: extNclose to close the encoder when the playlist is closed, and extforced to keep extensions the same when switching modes.

as i said, it still doesn't render perfectly, but i'm confident paul can conquer those issues in the next build or two. but what i've done so far may give you some new ideas/approaches...

p.s.: if it really gets stuck, you may need to hit shift+1 or shift+3 to manually close the extensions...

[ace2701]

YT; i made some changes to give behaviour closer to what i think you were intending. there are still some painting issues with QCD that yields less-than-perfect results when stretching, but F5 usually corrects that.

the major changes are:

-removal of the stretching control and close button for the encoder extension: instead leave these blank and use the controls from the playlist extension below. also, theoretically you should set the encoder extension to on-top priority so it doesn't get shuffled to the back when using the controls on the playlist extension, but with the painting issues things actually seem to work better without it.
-put a one-pixel border around all controls on the overlapping extension to help QCD know where to render and associate the controls better.
-added some statements to the skinfamily.ini: extNclose to close the encoder when the playlist is closed, and extforced to keep extensions the same when switching modes.

as i said, it still doesn't render perfectly, but i'm confident paul can conquer those issues in the next build or two. but what i've done so far may give you some new ideas/approaches...

p.s.: if it really gets stuck, you may need to hit shift+1 or shift+3 to manually close the extensions...
I've got both Young Twig's and regener8ed's versions, but I can't stretch the playlist, nor do I see any encoder window. What do I have to do to enable those functions? (I am using dev67)

[ace2701]

Never mind, I found it :o .

[Zayoos]

Cool skin, i love that your skin supports polish fonts in System Message Area :D not every skin does it.

[Young Twig]

Cool skin, i love that your skin supports polish fonts in System Message Area :D not every skin does it.
Didn't know it did. It's just Tahoma.

[Zayoos]

Didn't know it did. It's just Tahoma.
Anyway I like it :) but for example, default font in Nucleo Heel or in new MMD3 v2.0 from 2FAST4U does not support polish letters, instead of that i have spaces, "?" or squares :p

[chicubs]

I love it! Nice work twiggy. :D