Beta skin: TitleBar

[Bobly]

Hey guys :)


First skin ^^

http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/2462/screenshotlb0.png

To understand this skin you have to first understand how I use CD Art Display, I personally use it Always On Top to know what song is playing, however I found all skins a little too intrusive to keep on top all the time, so I decided to make TitleBar :).
Kudos to the developers for making it so easy to skin it by the way.

I call this skin a beta because I'd like to add some more sizes and colours before I release it, maybe change the graphics, and built it from a proper blank skin (It's currently just a heavily modified version of OtisBee's Avalon Companion, while all graphics are mine the Toolbar buttons were adapted from OtisBee's).

I'd love to hear any feedback you guys have :)

http://www.bobly.info/preview.jpg
Link: http://www.bobly.info/TitleBar.rar
No fonts
Currently the only width supported is 480pixels and I haven't yet gone into optimising the text colour so I've limited the background to 40% black.

[OtisBee]

hi Bobly!

that is one particular and yet tiny way to get a CD Art displayed. :D
i like it though and i already thought about creating a similar skin myself. ;)

still there's something i'd like to suggest...

...you know, since there are a lot of visual styles out there to customize a system it might be the coolest solution if you just make different font- and elementcolor substyles of your skin using only a transparent case.png.

this way it is no longer important which theme (visual style) you use on your system, your skin would always fit a titlebar. even the green, blue and silver default themes (styles) in XP.

of course there would have to be brighter skinstyles for dark titlebars (like i prefer) and vice versa.

personally i would like to have a better accessibility for ratings and volumebar as they have a more informational approach right now. i'm used to rating my songs via CAD but it would take a calm hand and a magnifying glass now to do this when i have your skin applied. ;D

but hey, after all it has to fit your own personal liking.
you're the skinner.
;)


....OtisBee

[Bobly]

Hehe you're right regarding the ratings and volume, I am slightly biased in that I don't rate my songs and I use global hotkeys to change the volume :P

However, you probably haven't noticed but the volume button is actually considerably bigger than it looks, it's actually 9 pixels high which makes it three times the size of the slider so it isn't too hard to grab, I tried to also make it easier to grab it by making it wider but there isn't anyway of setting the horizontal margin so the slider ends up off the axis ^^.

I think I'll probably re-do the slider and ratings system anyway, make the rating actual circles rather than pixel art :P

I like what you said about the background, it's true that so far I've only got WindowsXP themes because it's just something I did this afternoon, I am hoping to expand to include Vista and then also have many more "transparent" colours, maybe even of varying heights eventually :)

Btw the reason I have actual Grey/Green/Blue backgrounds that fit seamlessly into the title bar is because if the title of the page you're viewing is very long (I'm thinking mIRC where the whole topic is in the title bar) the text continues underneath CAD and neither the title nor the CAD info can be read :) This way it doesn't look like it's there but it actually covers it.

Work in progress but we'll get there one day ;)

[OtisBee]

when it comes to the rating graphics you might want to consider creating squared ratings.
as soon as CAD finds graphics with same height and width (e.g. 9x9px) the rating procedure would change.

take a look at my L.I.MO skin for example to get an idea of what i'm talking about.

the reason why i mention these kind of ratings is that a titlebar isn't very high to host vertical ratings and if you'd design them to be horizontal there might be a lack of space as well.
think about it.
;)