I usually leave Media Monkey open all the time on my old monitor and I wanted something less distracting and less bright. I use Autodesk products and really like their dark themes so I thought I'd try adapting that type of flat/dark style to MediaMonkey. In the end I just want something easier on the eyes with the most optimized performance. ( From looking at the current themes it seems a lot of them have extra images for no reason like " themeimage.bmp " and are referencing blank spots on the image which seems uneccesary ) I do have some design experience from building websites and other graphic things but I don't have any experience in skinning programs so if i ask some dumb questions please keep in mind i'm a noob who needs help. Anyways below is a screenshot of what i've got so far (you might have to right-click view image since it's clipped by the forum board ):
Now, there are 7 problems I still have to deal with and can't figure out at the moment. I guess I'm hoping someone can point me to the right spot in the theme editor to make these changes.
1. I can't figure out how to control the text color of the song which is playing or the color of the selected song text. I fell like this should be able to be done since it defaults to bold but I seem to have missed it. The text is suppose to be orange with a dark gray background when you select it; however, currently it will only show a darker background if you select it and then only after you select an item in a different list such as the Now Playing or the Tree will it change to orange and dark grey.
2. I can't seem to get the background of the search box to change. I found the ComboBox item in the theme editor and i was able to skin the button but I can't get the background to change. I tried changing all the "color" elements of the ComboBox, Frame, and Client and none of them worked. I thought maybe I have to add a bitmap element but I don't know how to do that.
3. I would like to get rid of those black margins left over between the nav tree, track list, and now playing. I saw how nicely the Vitreous Blue skin is with handling the margins and would like space like that. I assume I have to edit some margins somewhere but I don't know if this can but done without messing up a lot of other elements. I might end up having to start from the Vitreous Blue base instead of Glided if no one can figure this out.
4. I have replaced the TreePlus.png, TreeMinus.png, NoAArt.png, and NoAArtNew.png however they don't have an effect. It's quite odd because Media Monkey accepts all the icons from the same Icons folder but regects the pngs. It seems MediaMonkey will only recognize my new png changes if I rezip the whole Theme folder back however then if i do that the TreeMinus, TreePlus, and NoAArt images work correctly but I lose EVERYTHING else i've done. I noticed this might be a glitch with how Media Monkey interprets skins from folder uncompressed. For instance if we take out all the error I may have done and look just at the Vitreous Blue skin which has also made similar changes, if you just unzip the skin and rename the folder then view that same exact skin just uncompressed in mediamonkey you lose the TreeMinus, TreePlus, and NoAArt pngs just from uncompressing. Also, is there a special method for recompressing a folder of theme.mskn files back to .msz other than just archiving the contents of your skin folder to .zip and remaming to .msz?
5. I can't figure out how to change the color of the default popup menu text, or the background color for the item you are hovered one. See the picture below for better visual:
I've tried changing all the Popupmenu styles from the "Font" page in the theme editor but none of them seem to have an effect. And for the blue background I didn't find any sort of blue bitmap element that could even be changed.
6. How to change the color of the text for the settings independently of the listitems. I got the tracklist to be a lighter grey so it shows up against the darker colors but now it seems to have changed the colors of other "listboxes" which are on white backgrounds. Example below:
7. How to change the color of the status bar text
Again, I hope these aren't dumb questions, I really don't know what I'm doing, just hours of trial and error.
Let me know if you need better explanation or more pictures to help show you what I would like.Thanks,
Matt
