Ok, before I begin my rant I just want to put it out there that I DO enjoy, and love both SKS, and Windowblinds, and have for a very long time...however...
I've been working on a couple of skins, and wow, the amount of bugs I'm running into is astounding. Some things can be chalked up to good 'ol Winnders not wanting to play nice with others, but SKS has been really pissing me off lately.
I cannot get my rollup button's glow image to work in per pixel border for love nor money. Matter of fact, in one of my other skins all I did was adjust the edge alignments in extra settings for the close, min, max, buttons, and the glow simply broke. They were working fine with the default button glows, but I have circular buttons, and the glows are rectangular. So I made the glow images for them, and the second I adjusted the edge control settings they quit working. At one point I kinda had them back, but no matter how I adjusted the paint margins they just appeared as a smudged line so eventually I just gave up, and removed the images.
Another issue is the folder bar button mouse over state for the folder bar area itself. I designed a really nice, and unique button style that would have worked had the transparency worked correctly. It seems as though ANY kind of shape other than a simple rectangle, rounded or not, simply looks horrible. This is definitely an SKS issue because the error appears in the image preview as well.
Also, there are an abundance of issues pertaining to button text as well. The clock for the primary taskbar works as intended, but I have 3 monitors, and the clock text on the side monitors (aka panels), are bound to the taskbar buttons text controls. IE: if you don't want your clock to constantly change colors, ALL of your taskbar text HAS to be a single color, and font style.
The standard menu bar buttons won't display the correct size, and cuts the bottom edges of the buttons off even after adjusting the menubar height. So if you want a beveled edge you have to add image padding, which limits what you can do due to paint margins.
Don't even get me started on the paint margins, lol. Those are a headache unto themselves. Sometimes they work as described, other times they will tile even if no margins are set for it! Yes, that also includes the dropdown menu selections for "Tile the Middle", and "Tile the Horiz. Middle"
The "help" tab in SKS is all but completely useless, as well as some of the descriptions for what certain elements do. A lot of the elements, and sections don't even have previews for them. See, we REALLY need to know what an element is responsible for so we can skin it properly. IE: where is it used, does it resize, is it dynamic, or static, is it something that will be frequently seen/used, and if so how? These are what we need to know. Not "Frame Order..."
Listen, I'm not trying to be a complete bummer here, and cry a river, but I've lost literal days of design work on having to scrap images, and go with something SKS can handle. Not to mention the loss of creativity having to go with some bog standard rectangle image. Please understand that SKS seemed so much more feature rich, and intuitive with the XP/Vista days. There are things in SKS that it just doesn't do anymore, and a few things that aren't even relevant to modern OSes like Win10.
I saw, (didn't read), a thread pertaining to something about Win11 support, and so on. Here's an idea, try fixing what we already have before you abandon it for the next new, shiny thing! Take some time, and go back to the roots of what made SKS, and Windowblinds so incredible. Dive into the actual program, and remove what's no longer useful, and add things that are. When's the last time anyone's seen the "places" area of Explorer? Seriously, if anyone knows how to find it in Windows let me know, because I skinned it, and want to see how it looks, lol.
In part I'm just getting some steam off my chest, that's true, but this post is also designed to give a sort of catharsis to the many skinners facing these issues. I'm sure there's plenty more, but these are what I run into most commonly. Thank you for taking the time to read this pity party of a post, and hopefully it'll put a smile on someone's face, lol.
Welcome to the club, I and other skinners have said that SKS needs to be revamped, there (as you have mentioned) are areas that just don't work anymore, you use to be able to animate a lot of images in the entire skin, but now, you're just limited to the start menu, I'd love to add more animations to a skin, but can't, unless there's someone with more knowledge than me, that can enlighten me, I'd be a happy camper. Ever since Win 8.1 and 10, SKS is limited to what's skinable, so, I feel your pain....I believe there won't be any changes to SKS until Windowblinds 11 is out, at least I hope so, keep it up, don't give up....
yes...welcome to the "skin around it" club... lol not laughing at you, but most of us have been "skinning around" issues for almost 20 years....
Sadly, there are lots, and I do mean "LOTS" of bugs and incorrectly coded areas in SKS. No one at Stardock seems to care though as they have existed for many, many years.
but hello not so critical it is all right here !
the updates for Win 11
the community rules
the rating of the skins
we are all best friends and stardock is our home and live (irony out)
i know what i am talking about i have been using or trying to use stardock software for 20 years
I'm right there with all of you in terms of length of use. I remember "trying" to skin with SKS back towards the end of Win98SE. Does anyone else remember that weird fishbowl skin with the animations? Ahhh the painful memories! LOL.
Yes I do, and Treetog, did a fully animated skin called Antares.
Every part he could animate, he did it, but sadly, that's (ability to animate) not available now...
https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/suites/502/
I am still learning my way thru SKS and finding lots of areas myself useless. If not for the help of Tom i would be lost in many areas quite a bit. My 2 cents.
Yup, Tom is awesome. He's helped me out a lot as well. 2of3 helped with some text colors too. The community is really cool, and supportive here, which to me, is important. It helps with morale, and motivation. Yanno, I have an idea that's so crazy it just might work! With most elements, (I'll have to research this further), you can "delete this section from the skin". What if someone were to delete all the useless sections, and elements of the Diamond skin, and upload it so people can download it as a stripped down, "essentials" skin specifically designed for skinning?
We could, as a community, all pool our knowledge over what's still relevant, and what's not so the skin could be made without running into any issues. It could be labeled Skinners' Diamond (Win10 ONLY), and uploaded. That way it can be used as a template.
I'm not 100% sure if it could, but maybe even import it as a default skin so it would essentially overwrite the original Diamond skin. As long as it doesn't break functionality it could be a huge help to beginners, and a huge timesaver for vets because it would cut down on what needs to be skinned. Just an idea though.
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