Afternoon all, update time
First,
a bug...
My "Top Toolbar" skin is 23 pixels high. If I specify Border="Yes" in the skin xml, the skin has padding applied to the bottom edge, pushing it to around 40 pixels tall.
Second,
Every day's a school dayThe penny finally dropped in regards to font sizes. If they're not specified, they're pulled from standard view. All of my work thus far has been done with a standard view setting of "Normal weight, size 9" I kicked that up to size 12 and it made a real mess of the top toolbar skin, because I removed the font size instructions from the skin in order for it to work on the Mac.
Any number of users, on any platform, are going to be using a virtually infinite combination of font, weight and size settings in their MC. This makes it impossible for anyone to create a skin that's heavily reliant on text output, without working font size instructions in the skin itself. The only people the skin will work for are those that, by chance, happen to have the same font settings as the skin creator.
This is quite a big deal. I'm considering putting the font size instructions back in my skins and advising that they're only suitable as-is on the Windows platform. For others, it may not work, or will after a considerable amount of editing. I'll hold off for now, but you can see why this is concerning.
Third,
The volume sliderIt shows up. It works. It responds quickly if the volume is changed in Standard view too. We really need to be able to create our own stand-alone sliders though. Again, there is too much that's unpredictable, especially in regard to the amount of transparent padding the current standard view skin is using. Changing skins causes the slider in the popup to move around, mostly up and down depending on the padding, and while most 'kind of' worked OK, others did not. Here are some pics using a w.i.p. skin that has been abandoned at the moment due to the font thing...
The first two are using the stock "Z" skin, and "Dream In Blue". They just don't look right at all. "Z" has an erroneous speaker icon in it, and the one from Dream in Blue just looks pretty broken. It does work, but it's uglier than an ugly thing when it's split away from the rest of its standard view components.
The others, we kind of get away with, on this particular background, albeit with some movement on the x-axis. They're not great.
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So, that's my pitch for custom volume sliders done. Could this be possible? I have one other "oooh, that would be good too" thing, but I'll keep that for another time. Fonts and sliders are way more important than that
Thanks for reading,
-marko.