Skins

[George]

Would hate to see this lovely day go by without getting to display my ignorance. Was just reading the product development page. Pray tell what are "skins"?

Take care,

George

[danny_g]

I have a couple of programs that have skins. They are just changes in appearance of how the programs player looks.
say you have a dj program and instead of seeing flippers as the controls you want a dial. or instead of looking at a dj mixing board you want something that looks like a rack. You can do that just by changing the "skin".

[admin]

Windows Media Player is a skinned program example. So is winamp. :w

Skins make a program look better than the plain ole Microsoft gray square buttons and windows. Anything is possible.

There are 3 ways we know of to skin a cat... I mean a program. Two are purchased and the other is write it yourself.

We really studied the two programs and have rejected them. Thus, we're rolling our own. We feel there are two important points:

1. Don't allow the user to move buttons, fields or other controls. That way, everyone knows what is where in the Forums, manual, emails, etc. Support is a very important point for many users!

2. Allow the application to be resizeable and scaleable. This allows the program to be used with others on the same screen. We feel that Hoster is especially sensitive to this to work side by side (or top/bottom) with PCDJ.

We hope to have a skins appearance example on the web site next week. Microstudio is our first test. It's the most complex, but it is currently under upgrade and parts are used in Hoster also.

It should be a piece of cake to skin Vogone, Keyrite and KHProducer once we have it all down.

Sorry danny_g, initially we won't have the means for you to change control appearances. However, that will come. We think it is really cool to allow our users to exercise their graphic chops to make our products look better. We realize we're engineers without a lick of graphic savy. :g

Now keep your eyes on the News page for announcements. There's a BIG one coming soon that will prepare MTU for growth and far better support in many areas. We're real excited about all that is under way. :c

[danny_g]

wasn't trying to ask for any features in my previous post. was just trying to answer his question which you did as well as I tired to. Will it work beside mixvibes pro? that is the dj program I am using.