BlueShift-M 3.32 ReadMe document

 

Contents

 

Section 1 legal stuff

Section 2 what’s new in BlueShift-M

Section 3 bugs in BlueShift-M

Section 4 notes

Section 5 how to contact me

 

 

Section One: legal stuff

 

BlueShift-M is copyright © 2000 Anderson n’Swaart, all rights reserved.  You may distribute this skin as you wish, as long as the original archive that you got it in remains intact, with no alterations made.  If you wish to modify this skin, it is illegal to distribute it containing the names “BlueShift” or “BlueShift-M”.  Any modifications made must be acknowledged and credit to the original source (me) given.  I would also appreciate it if you would email me to inform me of what you’ve done.  I would be interested to see what changes you made.  Ravaj is copyright © 1997—2000 Anderson n’Swaart.

 

Non-compliance with the abovementioned copyright is illegal and could result in prosecution, or in me kicking your arse directly.

 

Since I do not have a skinning program, I have taken the templates from several other skins and used them as a base for BlueShift-M.  While none of the original aspects of these skins remain and any resemblance is coincidental only, I will list them below as acknowledgement:

 

·       Fusion AMPdeck 2 by Robin Sylvester, based on the word of Blayde for the main, equaliser and playlist sections

·       Topazio (author unknown) for the MiniBrowser section.

·       Sharp Green v3 by William Levasseur for the AVS section.

 

All other aspects of BlueShift-M, including the cursors and ReadMe files were made without any additional templates and no further credit need be given.

 

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Section Two: what’s new?

 

Several additions have been made to BlueShift-M from the original BlueShift skin; some are aspects of BlueShift that I did not like originally and finally got around to changing, and others are completely new.  I’ve tried to keep this readme briefer than the original BlueShift one (enclosed in this archive), but here’s the list:

 

·       BlueShift-M comes with an HTML readme instead of a text file, and the information displayed in the Winamp skin dialogue is read from a brief Info.TXT.

·       Altered the primary functions buttons so that they are all the same size—all the buttons along the bottom plane of Winamp’s main window—creating a cleaner, more consistent look.

·       Eliminated the really bright top left corners on all buttons, so they don’t seem to push out quite as much.  This works especially well in the playlist, where I wasn’t happy with the buttons originally.

·       Changed the volume and balance bars so that they’re smaller, rounder and not as vulgar.  Also modified the format of the bars so that there is no longer a gradient on the background, and the vertical position marks are brighter.  The positions marks no longer change as you move the balance bar, since I couldn’t come up with anything I really liked.  I think it looks better just as it is, and while this is somewhat less cool in a way, it does eliminate the dumb problem of the equaliser WinShade balance bar being stuffed up (see Original BlueShift ReadMe.HTM)

·       Gave a lot of areas in BlueShift a slight rounding, since the original skin was a little sharp in some places.  The sharpness was intentional since the BlueShift floortile is designed like this, however it did not work as I hoped.  The playlist window now has slightly rounded corners, as does the position bar in the main window.  Unfortunately, due to the way in which the template is made I could not round the corners of the playlist scroll bar.

·       Added scroll buttons to the bottom of the playlist scrollbar (I never realised that they were there before!)

·       Emphasised the drag button on the bottom right of the playlist window in blue, illuminated tones—it was too light before.

·       Changed the “BlueShift” sign at the top of the main window—it looked a bit out of place.

·       Modified the shuffle and repeat buttons a bit, so they look more like pressable buttons that stay in.  The original BlueShift had them constantly lit blue when activated; BlueShift-M lights them blue when pressed, then illuminates only the symbol when activated.  At the same time, I changed the icons on them since I was never happy with them from the beginning.

·       Modified the playlist- and equaliser-activation buttons, making them smaller and changing them in the same way as mentioned above with the shuffle and repeat buttons.  They now look more consistent with the volume and balance bars that they sit beside, and less obtrusive.  They were too big before.

·       The equaliser has been extensively modified, with a makeover on all buttons and the bars, taking these from the volume bar in the main window.  Also changed the bug that no one noticed: in the Fusion skin the equaliser has the maximum and minimum presets as +12 and –12 dB.  In BlueShift I took those values, which are actually incorrect, and should be +20 and –20.

·       The WinShaded equaliser now has a slightly darker background colour on its volume and balance bars, while the position lines are brighter, in keeping with the rest of the skin.

·       Lost the dumb little “play” icon that sits above the larger one when a track is going, and changes to a “stop” icon once the song gets to -00:06.  I never really saw much point to it, and it clutters the screen.

·       Cropped the “pause” icon that displays when a track is paused in place of the abovementioned “play” icon so that it’s a more consistent size; the BlueShift one was too large by a pixel on the top and bottom.

·       Fixed slight colour discrepancies in the playlist.

·       Added a gradiated vertical interlace to the BlueShift logo (where you click to access the Winamp info menu) in the main Winamp window.

·       Fixed the problem of a negative sign not showing beside the time when in countdown mode, due to the rather strange coordinate stuff-up in Numbers.BMP.  Thanks to Nullsoft for giving people like me who use rounded numbers a way around this using Nums_Ex.BMP.  Since it is not in the style of BlueShift floortiles to have the negative sign in front of the time however, it is not automatically activated.  If you want to see it, rename the BlueShift-M.WSZ to BlueShift-M.ZIP and extract the archive, rename ~Nums_Ex.BMP to Nums_Ex.BMP and recompile the zip.  Winamp will read the new Nums_Ex.BMP instead.  If you do not have WinZip, simply move the BlueShift-M directory containing the skin into the Winamp\skins directory and it will have the same effect.

·       BlueShift-M is now fully skinned, unlike the original BlueShift skin which only had the Main window, Equaliser and Playlist skinned.  See Section One for acknowledgements of other skins used as templates for the MiniBrowser and AVS.

·       Fixed the visualisation problem where black dots appeared at the end of the VU bars in WinShade mode.  This was because one of the colours in Viscolor.TXT was incorrect, though I didn’t realise until after I’d completed BlueShift-M.  This has fixed a major annoyance for me (I knew there was a logical explanation!).  In addition, the problem of the bars going black when they peaked if using the “Lines” option for the Spectrum Analyser has been mostly rectified because of this.  In actuality they didn’t go completely black, just dark blue-grey.  I don’t know exactly why the entire bar goes this particular colour in Viscolor.TXT when it peaks, but it does.  I recommend you don’t use the “Lines” option; use “Fire” instead.  See the Original BlueShift ReadMe.HTM for more details.

·       A dumb error in Viscolor.TXT was fixed (I must have been tripping when I wrote that particular part of BlueShift).  It said that the top of the Oscilloscope range was the brightest, when anyone who can count could tell that it was the dimmest.

 

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Section Three: bugs in BlueShift-M

 

There are a lot of small bugs in BlueShift-M that remain from the original BlueShift skin, and most of these I haven’t mentioned as they are very small.  For more information see the Original BlueShift ReadMe.HTM in this archive.  Below is a list of the more serious problems in BlueShift-M.  Most of these bugs are actually caused by problems with Winamp.

 

·       The clutterbar buttons are still a little effed.

·       Dragging the equaliser bars all the way down will result in the blue line directly below the equaliser graph disappearing as the graph overwrites it.  (Not a bug in Winamp, and fixable.  I just don’t want to rectify the problem since the equaliser looks better the way it is unless you actually drag the bars all the way down, and no one I know of does that.)

·       WinShade mode grows a grey line along the top when title-bar dimming is active and Winamp is not selected.

·       Depending on the sequence in which you click them, the shuffle and repeat buttons will either fuse, or separate from each other by one pixel.

·       I know that the function buttons in the MiniBrowser aren’t quite on the right coordinates—you can push them without touching them.  This is because if you make them taller they look stupid, so I compromised again.

·       When using the “Lines” option for the Spectrum Analyser the bars will seem to disappear if they peak at maximum.  This is a remnant of the original problem I had with BlueShift that drew black dots to the tops of the bars in WinShade VU mode and turned the bar black in “Line” Spectrum Analyser mode.  Check here for more details.

 

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Section Four: notes

 

optimising BlueShift-M

 

BlueShift-M is designed for and looks best at 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution with 32-bit colour, maximum contrast and minimum brightness.  If you have a crystal-clear 15- or 17-inch monitor 1280x1024 will look good as well, though I wouldn’t recommend trying 1600x1280 on a 15-inch, crystal-clear or not.

 

To those of you who are thinking BlueShift-M is too grey, adjust your monitor so black is black, not grey.  It will look much nicer :P  I would have changed it so that even on high brightness the dark areas look black, but it would have taken way to long and would have probably stuffed the look of the skin in the long run.

 

To make BlueShift-M look its very best, make sure you have Winamp 2.64 or later.  Then make sure that you have the WinShade VU option set to “Smooth”, and the Spectrum Analyser mode set to “Fire”.  The refresh rate of the Spectrum Analyser should be 35 or 70 fps, and I personally like having my Analyser falloff at the notch above fastest, with the Peaks at the notch above slowest.

 

system requirements

 

To run BlueShift-M properly you will need Winamp 2.05 or later and a 16-bit graphics card.  I wouldn’t recommend running it on Windows 3.x but it should be fine in Windows 95, 98, NT or 2000.

 

interesting titbits

 

In case anyone is wondering what the “M” in BlueShift-M stands for, it can be either “modification” or “modular”.  I was originally going to call it “BlueShift Mod” but I thought it was too long, and didn’t sound as cool.

 

BlueShift was originally created in Ulead PhotoImpact 4.2, and was modified into BlueShift-M using Adobe PhotoShop 5.5.  The BlueShift cursors were made using a coalition of PhotoImpact 4.2 and MicroAngelo 98.

 

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Section Five: how to contact me

 

Simple.  Write me at

 

            the_brainz@techemail.com

 

If you have suggestions on improvements to BlueShift-M, or have any questions, don’t hesitate to write (I’m so lonely—whimper, whimper).

 

If you want to check out the files on my iDrive, the address is www.idrive.com/the_brainz.  I keep some of the better skins I’ve found in my travels there, as well as some interesting documents.  Everything is in the shared directory.

 

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BlueShift­-M and Ravaj Tetralogy are copyright © 2000 Anderson n’Swaart, all rights reserved.

The archive that BlueShift-M came in may only be redistributed free of charge and with its original content unchanged.  Plagiarism of the material contained within is illegal and my result in prosecution, or me kicking your arse directly.