nosanctuary wrote:Except for an onscreen notes skin that I'm currently working on, my desktop skin suite is done. There are a couple of things I'm still researching to tweak things a bit, but thought I would post what I have and get some feedback.
Very clean and stylish! Nice work!
I do have a few suggestions for you to consider regarding the placement and appearance of the skins.
Generally, I try to avoid forcing the position of a skin to a fixed position, preferring to let the end user place it where they want. In your quote skins, you use
Padding=400,2088,0,40 to position the quotes, which is going to position it off the bottom of the screen for about half of your end users; about half of the monitors in use today use a resolution of 1366x766 or lower (reference:
w3school 2018).
I would suggest changing 2 lines in [MeterQuote] sections of both skins:
X=(#ScreenAreaWidth#/2)
StringAlign=Center
This X value will position the meter in the center of the screen horizontally and the StringAlign=Center will center it. I changed 'CenterCenter' because that would also center the text vertically, and without a Y value, the top half would be clipped. This allows the string to be set to any vertically center position.
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The flat style text works well with complementary wallpaper colors, but since you already are using some InlineSettings, I might suggest adding an InlineSetting
shadow effect to make the text stand out against possible similarly colored backgrounds.
Add a ShadowColor variable that compliments the FontColor chosen; FontColor=0,0,0 | ShadowColor=255,255,255 to your variables.inc, then add an InlineSetting shadow line to the text meters.
InLineSetting4=Shadow | 1.5 | 1.5 | 0.75 | #ShadowColor#shadoweffect.png
This shows it added to your clock and lovequote skins.
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Your weather skin is good, the only issue I see is the size cuts off the last 2 days on resolutions less than 1920x1080.
This may not be an issue for half of end users, but a version that fits 1366x768 would make the suite more versatile.
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In conclusion, your suite is very good looking, I do envy your artistic aesthetics... Sweet!