Topic: OS Skinning

Hey, looking at the control panel demo, I can't help but thinking "God damn it, I gotta skin this motherf#cker up right now!!!" No offense, but I'm pretty sure I can do a better job at skinning this thing.

Can you guys shed some light as to how the GUI is done? Will we be able to skin it in any way? Will it be flexible in terms of object placement and screens, say, like the WinAMP skins are?

I understand that the OS will be changed along the way and such, so you guys probably have made the GUI independable of the OS, or at least should have. smile

What's your take on this?

Re: OS Skinning

Hi,

this would be a very welcome modding!
I love skins and imagine a clean white chumby with OS X skin and icons? Lovely ... :-)

Re: OS Skinning

It's a hack, but not an easy worth while one to me.

~Ryan~

Re: OS Skinning

The "Control Panel" is a Flash movie, albeit a very sophisticated one.  It has some special privileges that give it access to the underlying hardware.  It is not currently Open.

We are building a skinning architecture, but it isn't public yet.

The Control Panel UI only comes up when you're changing a setting - normally widgets are running in full-screen mode.  Unfortunately, a lot of the published screenshots seem to imply that the Control Panel is on-screen most of the time and that the widgets run in a little window.

The appearance of widgets themselves are designed entirely by the author - we kind of like the 'anarchy' of widgets not having a consistent chumby "look" - indeed many of our content widgets echo the source of the content.  For instance, the Slashdot widget looks like the Slashdot site, the digg widget looks like digg etc.  It is important for these widgets to maintain this sort of branding in order to attract content partners.

Re: OS Skinning

Piece by piece it's getting clearer...

I'm glad that you are sorting out the skins. You will eventually find more slightly nutty people like me that insist that the interface should coordinate with the chumby's outerwear...I'm glad that you are listening and considering serious design issues like this ...you are forgiven for making me cry yesterday... big_smile

Re: OS Skinning

It was quite clear/obvious to me that the widgets are running in full screen, however, being able to transform the control panel into whatever layout/design I want is still a welcomed feature. For example, I'll be able to make it a top-bar style panel, with a more white and gloss feel to it, or top and bottom bars with smaller icons and no text, etc.

I'm very glad to hear that you guys *are* working on allowing us to skin the UI. I'm very excited about it, and cant wait to start making my own skins!
I just hope the skinning will be more flexible than just changing the colors/icons (read: not being able to move things around, or change their size/shape).