Skinstudio - Your likes & dislikes

SKS scares me. 
I'd love to be able to sit down in front of it as a noob and make a bad skin right off the bat.  I want it to be like using PowerPoint (I hate PowerPoint presentations but it makes my  . . uh . . point); fire it up, click and type a little bit and have something usable.   Then, as I learned more, I make better skins.

And as an aside, I know it's not the focus . . but OB2 skinning scares me too.  A little love there would be great

I love skin studio. NO complaints here.

I have been through Skinstudio top to bottom and the only thing i would hope for is for the zoom feature to pick up on Per pixel images. As is they are invisible with the zoom feature.

One thing that bugs me is the color capture tool doesn't work all the time. Very often it needs a kick to take the new color. Any improvements on that would be special.

I'd like to be able to to compact start menus etc without having to tweak WB file names.

skin studio in the elementary phase @$19.95 is not anything to write home about. Can anyone advise where I can get a tutorial about it? As it stands now, I'm not at all crazy about it. To be quite honest, I find it boring. It must be the upgraded phase that is the fun part.

Please advise where the tutorial is.

hehe... itemizing..back later :o)

@ Prises, if you find it boring, your not looking deep enough. If all your using is the shareware version I suggest taht you upgrade.  

One thing i wish for is better or more comprehensive previewing. For example the Start Panel Programs Menu Background and it's ItemBG don't even have a preview. Or disabling the UserIcon...it still appears in SS. And animations don't either.

But it still beats Notepad   

Forgot to add, the Button Visibility app previews the applied skin, wish it was the skin as it was editied in SS but like I said, the previews in Notepad are even worse.  

"real time" font previewing (including smoothing)

A seperate button ( or the default function for "Import" )made to "browse for file" instead of opening template function. Gets really old having to use the Dropdown on the import button to get to browse for file dialog.

Seamless adding of substyles without haveing to make duplicates of every single image in the new substyle thus doubling substyle.

Previews of animations skinwide.

Preview of more programs menu and its menu item states.

In general, full "all states " previews of all images with states.

SKS "gui" control of .uifiles.

More control for skinnign items individually without affecting other areas of the theme. (i know some things are OS contolled and cant be helped.)

Being able to import a JPG and NOT have it auto-convert to a BMP for the wallpaper.

Better documentation and updated tuorials for new users.

All of the previously mentioned suggestions from other users ( especially per pixel preview in zoom window.

Faster Apply times!!

Im sure I'll think of more after I wake up.

I think the XP icons in it need to go out for nice, Vista ones.

I would also like it if we could change the Import button default, because I NEVER use the clipping option.. I always use import from file all ready to use.

It would be nice if all of the fonts in the preview were not hard-coded and used cleartype if it's enabled.

There is a Vista bug where on reapplying a skin, all of the toolbar buttons shift, but when you click where they were, it does what it would have done if they hadn't moved.

Things like the titlebar text and icon in the preview aren't aligned properly - not WYSIWIG!

WYSIWYDG    

I'm good with 90% of SKS.A few things come to mind.

Ability to kill ALL tooltips...most are gone,that was a godsend.

Auto import fonts so I dont forget to include them.

Ability to rearrange the toolbars better for more working room.

Definite agreement on substyle management improvements needed.

Ability to hide or label attributes that have no effect or are shared.

Better font previews and ability to edit fonts the old way from one window instead of switching attributes and going back to preview to check.

WB animation dll needs some serious work.


I'm mostly happy with SKS...keep up the progress...thanks Neil and Adam.

Tha ability to scroll wheel thru "sections" instead of clicking up and down arrows.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that SkinStudio is intimidating. There's a lot in that program, and, well, it's a lot. I think it would be cool to have an alternative 'newbie' option that would have the program act like a paint by numbers, or a wizard to tell us what step to do, like: "In Photoshop, make a start button, save into whatever filetype, import to SKS, etc." Kind of like an interactive tutorial, though, I don't know how practical that could be in a program like SKS.

I found it to be mostly intuitive even as a beginner...its when you really dig deep that things become problematic.

I think the classic colours could have more explanation exactly what they are used for ect......

Brainiac - you can kill the tooltips by pressing alt.

I have one grief with SkinStudio, and that is when I edit the code in SkS. If I look at the code and switch to a different image I want to replace the file name for that file, SkS jumps to the line of code where the previous image I worked on is. That means I must select the image in the tree view again to access the code bit and paste the new filename in the code.

Ah yes I hate when it does that!

PixelPirate: Why do you need to directly edit the code?

Neil: I usually work over an old skin, make the graphics and name them something different everytime. I'm not that good with naming consistency. And I import png's to SkS, so if I need to replace a line with filename.tga to filename.png, I do that in the code. I really don't use the dropdown menu for images.

Speaking from my limited WB skinning experience, I would like to see SkinStudio have a Basic and Advanced editor.  The "basic" editor would allow you to create a basic WB skin with minimal effort.  The "advanced" editor would be more of what it is like today for people willing and able to take on more advanced skinning.

There you have the best of both worlds.

 

Ditto.

I'd like XP users to be able to easily tweak the horizontal shellstyles... They've been under-used, since nobody knows how to use them.

I didnt know that Pixel Pirate...thanks.

That dosnt stop them from appearing,just makes em go away faster.I especially hate the ones that appear while clicking the margin setting spin buttons...they get right in the way of what your working on and show up EVERY time you click.  

How about the option to automatically delete the default images when you import a custom image? This would save some of us from going in and having to manually delete tons of images. Maybe on the import image popup (where it asks if it has all frames in it) having an option to delete the default image upon import.

I would find that useful, along with almost everything people have already stated.