Classic Shell: Forum

Experiment
Part 2 of 3 Blackenlite Flat
Update. Now revB "Center user name" option is on permanently.



Made for Win8.1. Works on Win7, but would need to boost Windows system color intensity and brightness settings.
Tried with CSM 4.1.0
Not compatible with most older versions of CSM. Will only partially work.
After downloading file, paste in skins folder. Usually C:\Program Files\Classic Shell\Skins
Exit CSM, restart CSM, and go to "Start Menu Style" tab.
Pick Classic or Classic two columns.
Pick "Blackenlite Flat" in Skin tab.

Incentives
- Make Flat. No gradients. A bit like pancake roadkill. Only one pixel height.
- Integrate picture and separators more into the border, for compartmentized look.

The goofy
- Same as above. Not as appealing as I thought it would be. Still had to try it.
Menu looks like a floor plan. I see myself in the picture room in the top corner:)

- Single classic style, Glass color edge, Pale grey looks pretty ugly with bright color.
I turned off transparency, as it looked like dirty tracing paper.
If I make Windows system color grey, it looks acceptable if ones cup of tea, is light grey mud.
Interesting boo boo happened if brightness slider adjusted. Selector button and border can be either darker,
lighter, or same grey color. Everything dissapeared. I added reduction lines in the masks so one does not get lost:)

My favorite
- Tinted column/edge, with White & Darker tint, and only thick separators on right column.

-White & Lite tinted column, with transparency turned off, for a nice change.

Problems
- For such a simpler skin, it sure gave me scripting problems.
I swore a lot at the computer for it not following the text, as it kept misbehaving.
Copying and pasting more and more duplicates in different areas, I think most of it works now.
Cross fingers. I kind of forgot that variation Skin 1 is master, then any other skin will
be an overide, and then the exact placement of text in that other skin,
is critical as it overides everything before it. Probably the way it read my script is,
go forward 2, turn left 1, turn upside down 5 times, jump 2 and crawl back to where it started from.
Glad program not smart enough to laugh at me. I only laugh at myself:)
Let me know any problems, or better yet, try your hand fixing it, and upload a newer revision of it.
The more people skinning, the more we can trade ideas and fixes.

-The corners show the fuzzy pixels to help smoothen and make it look rounder.
I used Pixelformer with super sampling. There are probably better bitmap editor programs out there,
that can do a better job. The problem I have is when a mask is used, it does not track properly,
so some pixels will be darker or lighter, if Windows system brightness is boosted.
I manually adjusted some bitmaps, pixel by pixel. Takes too long to fix all. Sorry.

- Make sure to turn off menu shadow in CSM options.

Next up 3 of 3. Bye.

Quite nice; I really like what you did with the separator.. it really makes the skin stand out, and I hadn't realized separators would match taskbar color until now.


2 minor things about the username; I would suggest defaulting with 'center username' checked and maybe align left when unchecked Or remove the option altogether and just center it by default


Submenus can't differentiate between right and left columns can they? Otherwise I would suggest an option for white submenus on the left, and taskbar coloured on the right.
That being said this is definitely a high quality skin.

Still wish skins could support text inputs instead of just checkboxes, and radio buttons. It would make skins so much more versatile if you could change things like font size to any number.

Okeedokee, went for the easy. Put on auto center.

That's a handy feature of Resource hacker.
Just entered "User_name_align" in the Find Text. Press F3, and it finds them for easy change.

That would be a good idea for differences in the submenu.
At first I had the horizontal thick separators on the submenu. Looked ok on the right,
until I did a submenu search. It did not look so good with the big curved ends )---------(
Always a compromise has to be made, Just like I never found a good way of making the vertical thick ones join at top and bottom.
I could buffer/pad the selector buttons, but then it created some other issue.

I am going to auto center the other 2 parts of menu skin.