Trillian Astra Skin
From TrillWiki
IN DEVELOPMENT See Custom Window Skin Tutorial first
[edit] So What Needs to be Skinned?
If you were creating a skin from scratch you would need to create each and every thing that makes up a skin. My aim with this set of tutorials is to provide a base skin on which to learn and build - so you could essentially just create the window you want to use and stick with the basic windows that are included. If you're planning on creating and releasing a skin, I would recommend doing all the windows though, otherwise check out the Custom Skin tutorial!
A basic skin would include the following windows:
- Contact List window
- Private Message window
- Conference window
- Group Invite window
- Status window
- File Transfer window
- Template window
- Container window
- Notification windows (Systray alerts)
Additionally most of these windows would need an untabbed or tabbed version for the skin to be truly complete. This is due to the fact that the Container window is made to hold a lot of these windows, and when it's inside the container, it tends to look different to what it would be when not in the container.
As you can see, there are quite a few parts to a complete skin. Some of these windows might take very little time to complete, but others can take a lot of perfecting.
[edit] How Am I Going To Learn This All Then?
It's all quite daunting to see what goes into a Trillian Skin. Because of this perceived complexity a lot of potential skinners have been scared off. To make the process of learning to skin Trillian a whole lot easier we decided to create a tutorial based on actually doing. Less theory, more hands on.
So your first step will be to download the Base skin (link to file to be added here later). Unzip the file as you would any normal skin you've downloaded for Trillian but make sure you keep a copy of the file somewhere safe just in case you "break" something.
The next step is to keep reading here, and we will introduce a window type, go into a little bit of detail about what is needed on this particular window type, and then jump head first into the good stuff.
What you learn on one window will directly relate to every other part of the skin as well, so as you learn new skills you will find other things just fall into place!
Remember: Experiment! Read through the code and try changing things. If you change something and the skin no longer works, just reinstall it again!
[edit] Let's Do It!
- Skinning the Astra Contact List
- In progress!
