InstantGet Help - Skins - Usage and Design

InstantGet

Skins

Using Skins

Select "View->Skins->Select Skins.." to activate the dialog for selecting skins. In the dialog, you can click <apply> button to apply the selected skin on InstantGet. You can also double-click an item to apply the skin. Click <ok> button to apply the selected skin and dismiss the dialog.

Select "View->Skins->Disable Skins" to restore InstantGet to its original appearance without skin.

Design your own skins

If you don't want to look at the following configuration details, draw the window frame and button images and mail it to us. We'll create the skin for you.

To start designing your own skin, go to InstantGet installation directory, change into "skins" directory and then create a sub-directory with the name of the new skin, for example, "my skin". Create a file named "skin.ini" under the newly created directory. You have to write configuration information in "skin.ini" and put necessary images under the same directory. All pictures must be windows bmp files currently.

skin.ini should start with this line: [general]. Specify one option in each line below. An option line should be in the form of "OptionName=OptionValue". If you want to use default value for that option, simply remove that line.

Window Frame

You have two choices for the window frame, i.e., simple-fill frame and custom frame.

Simple-fill frame
In this way, you will design a skin based on a round-rectangle frame with a simple filling pattern. You need to supply the following parameters,

	FrameRect=left,top,right,bottom Define the thickness on the four sides of the frame. You can write "FrameRect=default" and it will be set to "6,29,6,6". The top side is thicker because it includes the caption. You must specify this option so that this skin is treated as a simple-fill frame.
	FrameCorner=radius Define the radius of the frame corner, or how round the corner is. Set 0 if you want to have square corner.
	FrameFill=picturefile Specify the picture file which will be used as the filling pattern for the window frame. The default value is "framefill.bmp".

Custom Frame
If you haven't specified the option "FrameRect" in the configuration file, the skin will be treated as a custom frame. You have to include up to 12 images to define the frame. They are,

topleft.bmp, top.bmp, topright.bmp,
lefttop.bmp(optional), left.bmp, leftbottom.bmp(optional),
righttop.bmp(optional), right.bmp, rightbottom.bmp(optional),
bottomleft.bmp, bottom.bmp, bottomright.bmp.

Please notice that the top-left corner is included in topleft.bmp(instead of lefttop.bmp); the top-right corner is included in topright.bmp; the bottom-left corner is included in bottomleft.bmp, the bottom-right corner is included in bottom-right.bmp. Also notice that left.bmp, bottom.bmp, left.bmp and right.bmp should be rectangular in shape because they will be tiled to adapt to actual window size.

Custom Buttons

There are four buttons to be located on the window frame. You can supply an image file for each of the buttons. Each image file must contain four images for the button in normal, hot(when mouse is over), down and disabled states, respectively. The four images should be aligned from left to right in the order mentioned above. The four buttons are minimize button, maximize button, close button and system button.

	minimize button: min.bmp
	maxmize button: max.bmp
	close button: close.bmp
	system button: sys.bmp

Windows 3.x and unix has a system button while win95 or later replace the system button with an icon. The users click the system button to get a drop down system menu. You can use InstantGet icon image as the system button by specifying this option: SystemIcon=true. This option has a default value of true. If you want to use sys.bmp as the image for the system button, you should specify: SystemIcon=false.

Caption