Wishing to Skin......

Published on December 30, 2007 By xSmokechecKx In Skinning

Alrighty fellas, and ladies....

I am a newbie to coding, and creating skins... etc. I am an avid Photoshopper... and would love to expand my creativity to the skinning community. I have no idea where to even start. I have purchased Object Desktop, which comes with TweakVista, WB6, DesktopX, etc..... however i have not started playing with them yet due to An error 13 message in Stardock.... which has prohibited me from Downloading them. A baseline starting ground... or some help with a list of things to start learning or reading about would be very helpful. I also have PE explorer.... which enables me to find images in the .dll files, and replace them... however... i replace them and everything still looks the same. Any ideas for that? Any and all help is useful from anyone.... especially with all the experience on this site. Thanks again!!

Very Respectfully,
Smokey

Comments

eieio

on Dec 30, 2007

Start here: Wincustomize Wiki

Lots of info to get you started

xSmokechecKx

on Dec 30, 2007

Thanks buddy.... that helps a lot.

vStyler

on Dec 30, 2007

Welcome and good luck

BoXXi

on Dec 30, 2007

Smokecheck: These days, a great place to start skinning is with a program called "Xion". It's a real nice music player, and has a fantastic skinning system where you just create the whole skin in Photoshop, name the different layers in a certain way, and then just dump the whole .psd file in the interfaces folder of the program and your skin is done!! No code to write, no horrible .ini files to edit, nothing! One of the best advances in skinning for a long, long time.

Check it out, and if you need any help I'd be glad to advise you on anything you need to know.

xSmokechecKx

on Jan 01, 2008

First of all.... Happy New Years!!!

Boxxi... Thank you.... as i am going to try to find this Xion.... and start there. I have no problem with photoshop. I want to understand all the lil things that make a skin. All the types of files... how to open and edit them, what they mean, what they do..... etc. I have been working on creating a skin for Yahoo messenger.... but i will see where that goes.

Thank you and any suggestions or explaations are always a big help.

Very respectfully,
Smokecheck

BoXXi

on Jan 01, 2008

Happy New Year to you too!
This is the link to the Xion website: WWW Link

You can download the player from there, install it on your system, and then take a look at the skinning tutorial here: WWW Link

If you are O.K. with Photoshop, it should be a breeze for you to create something useable very quickly.

As with most skinning, the best thing is to look at other peoples skins and see how they did it. Xion is the best for that as it's really easy to open the whole skin in Photoshop and see EVERYTHING that makes the skin work.

Let us know how you get on.

Have Fun!!................ BoXXi

xSmokechecKx

on Jan 01, 2008

Thx buddy..... i am going to start right away.

Very respectfully,
Smoke

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