Openskin Options

[Lattyware]

Ok, I love the idea of OpenDash, and I have desided that I would give my little gift. OpenSkin. It's a skinning program for OpenDash.

It's still in Alpha stages, and I'm not giving a release out yet, but it's going to hopefully make skinning a lot easier for the dash.

It's still pretty basic, and at the moment I am just putting together the base application, then I'll be actually adding functionality to actually make a skin.

The end features will be:
- Totaly WYSIWYG skin development
- Easy to use compiling and releasing tools
- Full save and load, plus import and export from skin
- Full manual editor
- Internally rendered preview
- External preview
- Maybee More...

And I'll be releasing it free and I might even open source it, but that will be once I'm done as i'm a very messy programmer, and I will need to clean up my code before it will be readable for anyone but me.

I hope that you enjoy the use of it. I'll probably release a BETA as soon as I get in skin compiling support, probably in a week or two. I'll probably not have importing support yet and plenty of bugs.

So... Ummm... There is somthing to look forward to, eh?

Lattyware.
www.lattyware.co.uk
ws.lattyware.co.uk
info@lattyware.co.uk

[d0wnlab]

That would be sweet.

The only thing to make sure is that it is easily extensible. For example, right now, there is dialogs for messages and for questions, that involve a background, title text, message text. I have implemented but not added to the document additional dialog for a progress bar that include a background, title text, message text, progress bar graphic, percent text. You'll want adding things like that to be simple as pie as things are still progressing quickly with the dash.

In either case, that sounds awesome!

Tom

[Lattyware]

Yeah, I guessed that would be likely. I decided to just get it working currently, and then once i've done that my cleanup will involve making it as easy to work with as possible for extensions, allthough I realise that with any drastic changes I may need to write up alot of code, but hey, such is life.

Glad you like the idea I'll stop talking, and start coding!

This post has been edited by Lattyware: Oct 16 2005, 07:34 PM

[Lattyware]

Ok, here is a pre-alpha release to keep you updated, and feedback on the UI would be nice. Read the readme for more.

OpenSkin 0.5 Pre-Alpha

[d0wnlab]

Sweet!

Looks like a good start. I'd suggest instead of the large text boxes explaining how to do things, put that in tooltips or a closeable help section, and have, for example in the resources section, a display of the resource in a box. You probably have that idea already.

I suppose you'd get a quick boost if you were to have my data structures for the skin-related stuff. I can provide you the classes, but they're c++ and need to have an environment where you can use libxml2, and templates. Would those help you at all?

This post has been edited by d0wnlab: Oct 22 2005, 06:04 PM

[Lattyware]

Yeah, the boxes were pretty temporary, And I think I'll go with a tooltip style idea. Which should work much better.

I have allready got a viewer for the resource. Try adding one and when you select it you should get a small box, which shows the resource.

I'm not writing it in C, so I'm afraid that wouldn't be to much use, unless you can put it in a Dll, but to tell you the truth I'd much rather write my own code anyway, as I will probably need to use it in other parts anyway, but thanks for the thought.

[Lattyware]

I'm sorry, but I'm a bit delayed, Sisters Birthday .

I'll hopefully get somthing up soon.

[d0wnlab]

Take your time. The dash isn't even out yet

[Lattyware]

Ok, after a lot of work (Blitz dosn't have Tooltip support as standard) I have got tooltips working, and I'm now working on the main part.