Skinning the Windows 7 Start Menu

And before anyone asks; yes, I have examined every W7 ready skin I could find, including Corporate, Diamond, and Aero Midnight.

just wondering if lowering the top text margin would fix the sp item being cut off in the start menu? (as in dropping the font down so its not sitting so high)

It does, but he (rightly) would like to have his margins on the right to be the same as on the left. I could not find any way to stop the clipping short of setting your top margin to 30px same as you, Brian.

If I were you, I would contact Danillo directly as he seems to know the most about win7 skinning at the moment.

There is no way to stop the clipping, thats how Aero is designed and I suppose what were going to be limited to without a little magic on Neil's part. Nice big dead area at the top of the start menu, wonderful. You'll notice all the SD skins are the same way.

As far as the glow, I haven't messed with it yet but if it is going to be overly complicated I won't be incorporating it into skins, having a yellow or orange glow on a skin thats a totally different color designed to have totally different mosuover colors, to me, looks bloody awful.

I would hope that we will, at some point get more (less restrictive) control of the start menu in the future, just as Vista went a step down , creativity wise from XP, now 7 takes us a step further down....imo.

Were going to end up with millions of plain rectangle start menu's plastered with textures as I see it atm.

That glow color is related to the kind of application that is being opened and is hard coded into the OS as far as I understood talking to Dani. You can however control the shape of the glow using the taskbar button mask. You would have to ask him, though because I never got it to work (perhaps I totally misunderstood what he meant) I have also been unable to make the panel expand work correctly.

All this I will look closer at when I start the Win7 substyle of my latest WIP

It takes its color from whatever icon is showing in the taskbutton for the app. so basically one might do a blue and grey skin yet have blue, green , yellow, red, purple, pink and flipping violet glows all over the taskbar from colors drawn from each apps taskbar icon. You have to create a mask for the taskbar buttons to correctly show the glow, which in most cases is also going to affect\restrict taskbutton design.

Now to me.. and I may be crazy but to me, it's absolutely useless and contradicts the very point of skinning.

Might look good with Vienna spectrum, otherwise, sorry , I don't want a rainbow of colors glowing from one end of my taskbar to the other.

Another wonderful example of Win 7 \ Aero \ MS genius

Flash button... WAY blown out, barely legible with the white text....and I dont even think i caught it at its brightest point. 

Lastly, and hopefully, perhaps if we have to have a user icon to take up the space, then some control over the user pic holder would be nice, teal blue is lovely over a teal blue or black skin, and horrid over anything else.

Oh one more thing, not having control over shutdown\loggoff button horizontal positioning unbalances the start menu horribly too.

In my case it was 40.

This is the opinion I was leaning toward as well. My regular mouseover button has a completely different style of glow, not to mention the lack of a rainbow.

I tried...  ...

Okay, so now the next question: We've established that (at least for now, without intervention from Neil) this is a lasting problem. Now, the XP and Vista versions of the skin look great w/o a user pic. So do I leave it off in 7 and accept the dead space, or do I stick it in there in the 7 ss to fill it up? Opinions?

gonna look bad either way imo.. I'd probably leave it off depending on how well it matched.. diff blue i know , but at least the skin is blue.

conversely we could all start cutting user pic sized chunks out of our menu's, wouldn't that look great. ?

I swear MS is trying to kill skinning as we know it.

Maybe it's time to start making Dreams or IP's for a living.

You just gave me a really funny thought...

What if someone took a bite out of that part of the menu?

I think Dani did that with corporate...sorta..I don't have it on XP so can't quickly check the design, however, while it looked good, seeing some kind of 'area' for it on every seven skin would get old quick.

In addition , you wouldn't be able to make it fit snug.. sure the user pic you could, buuuut... each icon in each icon package that appears on mousover all vary on horizontal placement and some, depending on the icon, and the package would end up not sitting right or hanging over whatever border or cutout that was put there.

Hey guys, I don't know anything about WB skinning.......but,  would it be possible to add a transparent section at the top of the start menu to offset the location of the user pic margins?????

I was thinking more literally... LOL!

Might work, never experimented along those lines.

Well, start experimenting, I'm curious to see if I came up with a winner!

That just might work fred!

Give the top part of the startmenu say 30 to 40 extra pixels of extra blank canvas. It's worth a try anyway.

Holy Crap, Fred!

That works!

Here's what I did:

Added 30 pixels of blank canvas to my top part image (adjusted margins and height settings to compensate). I was then free to move my test margins on the right side up. I did 30 to test....trial and error will show you how little extra canvas you can get away with.

This will, of course give you issues with a larger gap when using taskbar on top.

Cool! I'm definitely going to try it! Thanks, "Fred"!

yep

you know the garbage man in the dilbert cartoon that mysteriously shows up and offers genius advice...

Cool!

yep 

well, that sucks.......but, it's still one more option for You guys to work with at least. if any other ideas pop into My brain, I'll let You know.

shhhhhh.......now they all know who I really am!

Hmmm... so who's Wally? 

Fred is really Treetog in disguise!!!  We caught you out buddy!!!