Designing A New Skin

[DaDuber]

well I copied the SxxLxxS and started changing that one. It will let me have the menu where I want so I think that's the way I need to do it to get it to work the way I want. I will let you know how it works out. I just need to change everything in it, gonna take a little while.
thanks...

[Mark Norville]

I just done this quick video for you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UucWE76rCB4&feature=youtu.be

I am getting lost in what you are trying to do but apart from the pop up menu I have just done your design within two seconds.

[Barcrest]

The pop up menu and the normal menu are 2 different things. The touchgeni uses the normal menu which is displayed at the top all the time. SxxLxxs uses the normal menu but also the popup menu to display multiple things in the same space. This trick is achieved by having the pop up menu appear over the normal menu when you hit the pop up menu button that i think has been named something like more options.

[Mark Norville]

At the moment I don't think it is clicking in. I loaded up what I downloaded and the icons were there but he had the page set for say 600 and the icons was at 800 so the menu was hidden. I only done a quick video to show he has everything there already but he is over thinking and until you stop over thinking then it gets more complicated. I was the same you think why is this not working, how can they display something I can't so apart from bugs which there are fewer of now it mainly is point and click and needing to know what HTML and frames are about. I mention that as if you was creating a website this is similar you have a page, navigation top, left or bottom and then your main content in the middle.

This reasonably uses frames and as long as you think that each page is going on top of each other, if you put a black page on a white page, you will not see the white page any more, so you have to rip bits out of the black page to show the parts of the white page you need to see.

The only way that you could make this easier is actually having the main page more point and click rather than a jumble like it looks to start with, it is only when you realise that you have to edit each page and that Null and Album view play a part of what is really the main view.

[DaDuber]

got a lot done. having a couple of tiny problems
1. on the tracklisting page the play count:8 and play count:9 don't show for me to adjust there position in the skin tool. shows up on the jukebox though so I know its there just can't adjust.
2. I was fooling with the numbers on albums.cov and it doesn't seem to change anything. I would like to align all albums covers and backs to exact numbers. they're a little off. Is there anyway to do this?

thanks....

[Mark Norville]

The track listing page should be bug free I will check but I will say that if you go to your file/control panel and then change the number of tracks to show and then change it back to the number you had originally that should work, but it might take a couple of times.

Ok I was wrong, there is a problem with track listings but if you change the tracks then it should appear eventually. The problem I have with track listing is label 3 so when you are doing tracks, make sure that you save every time that you make an edit as I was having the skin tool crash on me so I ended up losing the work I had done because of one difficult label 3.

Another tip for track listing is if you do need to move something and you are finding that you cannot move what you want to move, move the others away from that label and it will start to move then, but best to get that label in first.

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Regarding alignment that is sadly the biggest problem out there you should be able to enter numbers into a box on the skin tool, but all what you see is TXT3 so this is a bug that hasn't been corrected yet. It is annoying as you have to move everything with the mouse so the alignments are never 100% unless you spend a few hours trying to move it as best as you can.

[Mark Norville]

Infact I done a video of it a while back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR5svQDrDsg

If you skip to 3:25 that is when I started messing around with the track listing screen. My problems was too do with similar artists but the video shows about moving labels about 6 minutes in.

[Barcrest]

YOu can align things exactly if you edit the ini files.

[DaDuber]

You can align things exactly if you edit the ini files.

can I edit the album.cov?

I need to edit the tracklist_v2.ini i believe. but I don't know what to edit to make playcount 8 & 9 to move down and to the right.

you can see in this video:
https://youtu.be/FNQII_ffw2c

never mind with the track ini I found it. I had to edit line 449,450 457,458. Is there anyway to put comments in the ini file?

[Mark Norville]

Skin is getting there, see you have managed to have pop up menu displayed all the time nice.

INI file syntax¶

INI files are best known from Microsoft Windows, but they are also used with applications that run on other platforms (although their file extension is sometimes ".cfg" instead of ".ini").

INI files have a simple syntax with name/value pairs in a plain text file. The name must be unique (per section) and the value must fit on a single line. INI files are commonly separated into sections --in minIni, this is optional. A section is a name between square brackets, like "[Network]" in the example below.
[Network]
hostname=My Computer
address=dhcp
dns = 192.168.1.1

In the API and in this documentation, the "name" for a setting is denoted as the key for the setting. The key and the value are separated by an equal sign ("="). minIni supports the colon (":") as an alternative to the equal sign for the key/value delimiter.

Leading a trailing spaces around values or key names are removed. If you need to include leading and/or trailing spaces in a value, put the value between double quotes. The ini_gets() function (from the minIni library, see the minIni manual) strips off the double quotes from the returned value. Function ini_puts() adds double quotes if the value to write contains trailing white space (or special characters).

minIni ignores spaces around the "=" or ":" delimiters, but it does not ignore spaces between the brackets in a section name. In other words, it is best not to put spaces behind the opening bracket "[" or before the closing bracket "]" of a section name.

Comments in the INI must start with a semicolon (";") or a hash character ("#"), and run to the end of the line. A comment can be a line of its own, or it may follow a key/value pair (the "#" character and trailing comments are extensions of minIni).

For more details on the format, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file.

[Barcrest]

The ini files are just text files i use to store the values, there is no set format. If I was to comment them all it would involve changing the skins and we would need to redo all the skins again. Having comments slowed down the skin loading process as the comments were loaded as well which is why i dropped them.

Here is an updated skintool to fix that play count bug not showing up the extra labels when you change the amount of tracks.

Error Trapped Skintool

Download Link

[Mark Norville]

I will give it a proper try tomorrow but still some issues with 9.17 regarding track listings. I only done a very quick test on one skin I was messing about with but it might have to be a case of starting again on the other skin.

The joys of skinning lol

[Barcrest]

Well that fix was only to make sure the play count labels showed up if you change the amount of tracks shown. If there is another bug please let me know and i will fix that if i can recreate it. This is why I just posted up the skintool on it's own rather than make a full release, if you notice any other skintool bugs please let me know and I will fix them.

[DaDuber]

Here is what i see in the new skintool




and here's how it shows up in etouch:




I don't see the 2 label 60's and a bunch of label 64's. under the stars there displayed but I can't move them if I don't see them or know exactly where there are in the ini file.

thanks

[Mark Norville]

You are having the same problem as I am where the name of the artist for the other albums, genres and years is missing. I have got a feeling that it might be down to starting the skin again. I might just create a new skin and then see what happens with the new version.

I would recommend that you do what I do and have a couple of days break from skinning as sometimes it does get frustrating and once you get frustrated that it forms a mental block. At the moment I am having a break as much as possible from the whole side of things, e.g I don't want to tag or skin or do this that or the other.

I honestly hate MP3's as they take up so much time if the tagging was bad then it takes a while to correct that, in a lot of ways this is supposed to be a hobby but a lot of the times it feels more like a full time job.

The weird thing is that I don't actually listen to music a lot of the times I am sat in peace and quiet, but it is just a boys toy for me to have my cabinet now and if I wanted to be flash if I had company then it looks good.

I will be back on the computer in a minute, so what I will do is create a new skin and then give that a try and report back.