Windows > Third Party Plug-ins, Programs, and Skins

Update of all Easy Grey and Easy White Skins! Again.

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markf2748:
@Jappie - thanks for your reply.  I first joined the Interact Forum on 10/1/2020, around the time of my first MC license (~MC27), so I am also a relative newcomer to JRiver compared to the many more experienced hands helping out here.

I find MC can be pretty wonky wrt drawing narrow vertical borders on Frames like the Options popup.  For a border 2 columns wide with a single bright magenta border column (test color on the outside edge), I am convinced MC first draws the popup showing the magenta column, but then in a quick flash redraws it with the bright column missing.  However if I mouseover the frame's Top Border or Bottom Border, the bright column gets redrawn and is visible as expected!  I believe the underlying effect of adding columns, transparent or not, is to effectively pad out the border to 5 columns, at which point MC always draws things as expected for me without needing a mouseover to prompt a redraw.  So I no longer use transparent columns, and now pad towards the inside with dark opaque columns to suit.

Issues that clouded my experience:
(1) I was inadvertently using too low a dpi in some of my Inkscape images.  I find that 96 dpi gives consistent predictable results.
(2) I tended to use images that were far larger than needed, in a naive belief that making the image close to the final size would improve the success rate of MC.  Not true IME!  I forgot that simple small images, generally much less than 100 x 100 pixels, along with proper drawing instructions when needed, really help the drawing engine do its job.  Thanks for reminding me of that.
(3) MC's ?-Flex mechanism works very reliably to fix/expand most images in controlled ways and is easy for me to understand.  I find it unnecessary to use the Cells mechanism (which I do not fully understand anyway) for Frame borders.  I've successfully tested the Frame borders over a wide range of MC Sizes and variety of Frame popups, always at the recommended Windows Display resolution for each of my 3 monitors.

After far too many hours of horsing around with this, I am now in a good spot.  :)

EnglishTiger:
Jappie & markf2748

Open the main.xml for the ThunderStorm skin and it's Left & Right Frame Borders in your image editor and you will learn one of the secrets of handling rounded corners for a Frame.
Unlike most of the other 86 skins I'm working on that one is using flex commands to manipulate the borders.
N.B. the frame left and right borders are only slightly rounded but they never distort on my 1920x1080 screen with every MC Size.

For contrast download and install one of the Opus MC Skins from the skins download page, they all have well rounded left and right frame borders but because the images are not manipulated they distort when the MC size is not 100%.

markf2748 - 96 dpi was the original MS/Intel spec for the old square screen CRT Monitors, and because they love to be different the original Apple spec was 72 dpi.

markf2748:

--- Quote from: EnglishTiger on March 06, 2025, 05:47:38 am ---Open the main.xml for the ThunderStorm skin and it's Left & Right Frame Borders in your image editor and you will learn one of the secrets of handling rounded corners for a Frame.
Unlike most of the other 86 skins I'm working on that one is using flex commands to manipulate the borders.
--- End quote ---
Yes. ThunderStorm does the rounding on FRAME::LeftBorder:Bitmap and FRAME::RightBorder:Bitmap, using FRAME::Data:BorderTopBottomLarger="0" to run wide vertical borders all the way up and down to meet the edges of the Frame.

I've used the same general design principles with ?-Flex, but put the rounding into FRAME::TopBorder:Bitmap and FRAME::BottomBorder:Bitmap, using FRAME::Data:BorderTopBottomLarger="1".  In this case the bright 1 pixel wide vertical border stripes (with usual square ends) meet the TopBorder/BottomBorder at their Bottom/Top edges respectively.

The Option window popup and its Close dialog message, both with rounded corners, are shown in the attachment for a 15 pixel rounding radius (in my 60x25 px artwork).  Gray borders and round corners look good at all MC Size settings.  The rounding radius in this scenario can be made somewhat larger, but is limited by the vertical height which MC allows for the BottomBorder.  Rounding on the verticals may allow a larger radius, at the price of making the border correspondingly wider.

BTW, I noticed in testing that the BottomBorder also has a refresh issue at its top row, similar to what I reported above for the LeftBorder's left column.  In practice the issue is not noticeable for the BottomBorder as long as its top row is not in a contrasting color relative to the background.

3/8/2025 Note:  The same technique is easily applied in section <MAINFRAME> to create round corners with a narrow all-around border for the main window.  Confirmed for 20 px radius with 1 px border and wider.

Win 11 Pro 64-bit | MC 34.0.3 (beta)

Jappie:

--- Quote from: EnglishTiger on March 06, 2025, 05:47:38 am ---Open the main.xml for the ThunderStorm skin and it's Left & Right Frame Borders in your image editor and you will learn one of the secrets of handling rounded corners for a Frame.
Unlike most of the other 86 skins I'm working on that one is using flex commands to manipulate the borders.
N.B. the frame left and right borders are only slightly rounded but they never distort on my 1920x1080 screen with every MC Size.

--- End quote ---

I looked at the Thunderstorm skin a year ago and was not impressed with that jagged, 'transparent' corner.
On a 1920x1080 px display the jagged edge will be noticeable, on a higher dpi-display less.

I think a JRiver skin should produce a high quality image. This implies: not with limited transparency.
Rounded corners are nice though, so I tried it on Easy Grey rounded and Easy White rounded (version 0). Not on the Mainframe but on all other (popup) windows. The transparency issue is less noticeable when the corner is on the background color of the skin, and of course when we look for a menu-option and not a corner...

Flex-coding is not a problem. Only issues that show on skin-size 50%, 300% or 400% can take some time to find a (flex) solution :)

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