Stixe
From TrillWiki
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[edit] What is Stixe?
S.T.I.X.E. (pronounced "sticks" or "sticks-sy") is Skinning Trillian Is eXtremely Easy.
- For users, a Stixe skin is sure to have emoticon pack and interface pack functionality and it must have a fairly standard and consistent layout that they were used to.
- For young skinners, Stixe skins are easy to edit and allow them to create their own first skin quickly.
- For experienced skinners, Stixe is a shared library of codes and 'short-hands' that they can take advantage of to create hybrid skins, or to kick-start a new skin right away.
- For interface builders, Stixe interfaces are as fun as Lego.
[edit] Advantages of Using Stixe
Stixe itself is a skin framework by Kid of Cerulean Studios in which all of the code has been done for people who simply want to change the graphics. It was designed to make skins with straight-forward coherence and extensibility. Advantages of Stixe include avoidance of coding SkinXML, consistent look, small distribution size, easy slicing of graphics, use of interface and emoticon packs, and a lot more.
Since icons and emoticons do not need to be redistributed along with a Stixe skin, no icon and emoticon permissions are needed. And since most codes used by Stixe are updated alongside with Trillian, your skin coded in Stixe will be updated automatically along with Trillian in most cases.
The whole skinning process will take around a week or so, with most of the time used for designing windows. If you are just porting a skin, it may only take around a day to make it! Making and porting skins for Trillian has never been so quick before!
[edit] What is a Stixe Element?
The fundamental concept that you need to understand before making any Stixe skin is the concept of elements.
A Stixe element is a unique and generic component in a window layout that cannot be further broken down and can be applied generally to many parts of a window.
In the design of the Stixe skin language, we had deduced around 20 elements that are unique. And skinners who make Stixe skins will be responsible to design and skin all of them individually.
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To further understand the definition of a Stixe element, here is an example. Take a look around the windows in Windows, and you will notice that all buttons look the same except with different text or size, and all scroll bars look the same, and all the frames of the window look the same. These duplicated parts that look the same is an element: They are generic because a button is designed to hold any text in any size, and they are unique because a button cannot exactly replace a window frame.
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Applying this logic back to Trillian, the Button element in a Stixe skin will as a result be used for all buttons in all windows of Trillian. The Scroll Bar element will be used for all scroll bars in all windows of Trillian, and so on for the rest of the elements.
A Stixe skin supplies the graphics to compose these elements, along with a small amount of settings to let Trillian understand how the graphics are to be used. With these inputs from the skin, Trillian can then orchestrate these skinned elements, line them up correctly to form the layout of each window, fill each up with displays and controls, and then present them to the users.
[edit] What's inside a Stixe-based skin?
A Stixe skin, after you downloaded it from the Trillian Skins Gallery, is a TSZ file. To dissect the skin, you need to rename the file into a ZIP file. If you are a Windows Me or XP user, you will be able to open the file right from Windows Explorer. The content of the zip file is fairly simple and is composed of:
- /images folder: Contains all the image files that give a unique identity to the skin and to Trillian.
- settings.ini: The 'soul' of the skin. Contains the minimum amount code to allow Trillian to understand how to use the image files.
- desc.txt: The descriptions of the skin to be shown in the Skins Preferences page in Trillian Preferences window.
- colors.ini: Specifies the display colors of the text inside a text conversation.
- preview.bmp: The preview picture of the skin to be shown in the Skins Preferences page.
- trillian.xml: Trillian reads this file first for any skins. You do not need to edit this file in most cases for a Stixe skin, however.
In most cases, only the files in the images folder, settings.ini, preview.bmp and desc.txt are required to be edited in preparation for a new skin.
