Another new skin idea

[coffee]

Hi

I think I have a great idea. I was thinking of a way a general freebox user with no skintool or graphic skills can customize or create his own skin. This is possible with some minor changes. It will take someone less than 2 minutes to customize a skin.
In order for this to happen I need someone to add support for transparent GIF pages for all the pages except the main page. The main page are allways in the background. If I then create all the pages with the background of that page transparent you will allways see the main page at the back.
This means a user can only replace the main page image in the skin image file or in the skintool and he will have a skin with a completely new look. You can even have a function in the config to use your desktop image as the background or main page.
You can create this skin in many different colours so you can choose a colour which matches your background image.
I have tried this allready but the transparent part of the page comes out white as in the sample below.
Another big advantage is that you can use animated GIF images as your background.
If this is possible it would be an awesome skin. Barry can start version 6 with this if it is possible. Let me know what you think.

Coffee

[Barcrest]

Have you played with the transparency setting in freebox, it makes the whole app transparent. I had that with a partial transparency and a desktop visualisation and it looked awsome.

[coffee]

Yeap, I've allready tried it. It makes everything transparent.

[Barcrest]

Looks good though right 

[coffee]

Looks good though right 

Yes it does, but it's not what I have in mind. I'm speaking in terms of the skins for freebox. Adding support for transparent GIF pages in the skintool would be a first for jukebox software and will open up a lot of possibilities for the users. It would add the ability for users to really costomize there skins.

[Barcrest]

Looks good though right 

Yes it does, but it's not what I have in mind. I'm speaking in terms of the skins for freebox. Adding support for transparent GIF pages in the skintool would be a first for jukebox software and will open up a lot of possibilities for the users. It would add the ability for users to really costomize there skins.

It would also involve me coding the whole thing again from scratch and if i did that i would attempt to do it using direct X so GIFS wouln't be required for transparency then anyway but there is no way on earth I have the time to devote to that i'm afraid. Maybe i'll win the lottery one day and then you might see it happen.

[coffee]

Hi Barry

OK, scrap the idea. I really thought is was not that big a deal to incorporate this but to start everything from scratch is just not worth it. At least we tried.

Coffee

[Barcrest]

The thing is right now each page is PICTUREBOX and they don't support transparency with gifs so i would need to use another control or make a custom one. The PICTUREBOXES act as a container and the GIF control i am using doesn't. Also the GIF control doesn't support any other image format only GIF. I really would like to make the juke more graphical eye candy is what attracts people but with what I have right now it's very limited. I am looking to add support for a few more animate GIFs to try and liven up some of the pages. I think it would be nice to have an animated title on every page if possible.

Something like FILTER on the Filter page or TOP10 etc to be animated GIFs simular to the make a selection would be a nice start i think. Issue with adding new features is the time it takes to get them tested and then get the skins updated. I am away this weekend but i am hoping to get a new beta out before i go that fix up some problems, i may try and get support in for a few extra animated GIFS at least so you guys can have a play.

[coffee]

Hi Barry

I understand fully what the problem is. I just thought it would be cool to have transparent pages so you can just change the background or main page image and have a completely different looking skin. I still have a few other ideas I need to try out. I do understand that if one has to start from scratch with freebox the time and effort would not justify the end result.

Coffee