BlueShift-M
3.32 ReadMe document
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
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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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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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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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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Simple. Write me at
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.