Ravaj® BLUESHIFT© skin by Anderson n'Swaart

 

Contents

 

Section 0 legal stuff

Section 1 introduction

Section 2 system requirements

Section 3 questions and answers

Section 4 known bugs in the skin

Section 5 bugs found in Winamp

 

 

Section Zero: legal stuff

 

Yeah, boring.  Here's giving you permission to do pretty much whatever you like with this skin, as long as:

 

1.    If you redistribute it in an altered form, you stick my name somewhere as credit to the source, or include this ReadMe.

2.    You don't try to convince people that you made the skin, not me.

3.    You don't use the name BlueShift as it is now, or Ravaj, or Ravaj Tetralogy, since these are all Copyright © 1997—2000 Anderson n'Swaart.

4.    Thanx.

 

An additional note: if you decide to modify my skin, and you think that what you've done is pretty good, don't hesitate to send it to me :-)  My current address is

 

                        the_brainz@techemail.com

 

(And in case you were wondering, the_Brainz is not something I made up—one of my friend's brothers decided that it was a good nickname for me (I don't think he knows my name, sshh ;-) )

 

Acknowledgements: Both the Angedelo and Fusion AMPdeck 2 skins were used as templates.  Spec.BMP (with colour changes) and Region.TXT are borrowed from Fusion AMPdeck 2 by Robin Sylvester, based on the work of Blayde.  All other sections of this skin are completely original and any resemblance to other skins, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.  All templates were completely reworked, and none of the source files remain in BlueShift, except for one of the background colours originally used in Main.BMP and extended to several other files, which is R:45 G:45 B:45 and comes from the Fusion AMPdeck 2 skin.  (I wonder why he used that colour, instead of something like R:41 G:53 B:46—easier to remember maybe ;-)

 

 

Section One: introduction

 

BlueShift is my second Winamp skin, and like the first it is based on the general layout of the BlueShift Lin-X operating system used by the UnderGround in RAVAJ, the tetralogy of books that I am currently writing.

 

 

Section Two: system requirements

 

·       Well, for starters it's good to have a computer, and Winamp ;-)

·       Winamp 2.0 or later, I believe, if you want full skin support.

·       A graphics card that can do 16-bit colour or better, though 32-bit kicks the pants off 16 or 24 with this skin.

 

·       For your viewing pleasure, it is recommended that you run this skin at 800 by 600 resolution, on 32-bit colour.  If you have a 17" screen, 1024 by 768 should be okay, but I don't :-P

·       Additionally, ensure that your visualisation settings are on the "fire" spectrum analyser, with thick lines, unless you want to use the oscilloscope, and have your screen contrast all the way up, and your brightness as far down as makes black look black, not grey.  That's what my settings are, so that's what the skin was designed for.  (Also, at high brightnesses, you may be able to make out some imperfections that I don't want you to know about ;-)

 

 

Section Three: questions and answers

 

Well, no one's asked any questions yet, but you're probably wondering . . .

 

Q          What happened to my first skin, and what was it like?

A          I deleted it by mistake.  I'm sure one of my friends still has it somewhere . . .  Anyway, it was also a BlueShift skin, but just called UG-AMP.  I basically stuffed             around with the Fusion AMPdeck 2 skin so much that I could call it my own ;-)  It was slightly incomplete, as I got sick of it before I could finish the EqMain.bmp.

 

Q          What is Ravaj, and can I read it?

A          Ravaj is a volume of four books—or it will be.  At the moment, Book One is in the works and Book Two is complete.  It's basically the Third World War set at the             turn of the twenty-second century, but it's more complicated than that.  I won't go into any more details, but if you want more info, my current email address is, as I             mentioned before:

 

            the_brainz@techemail.com

 

Q          How did you make this skin?

A          With a lot of patience.  Having ironed out the internal workings of Winamp's skinning system with the last skin I made, this one didn't take nearly as long coz I             knew what I was doing from the start, but it was still pretty time-consuming.  I discovered still more little annoying bugs in the skinning system (no offence to the             people at Nullsoft—they've done a great job nonetheless) which had to be worked around, but you will find that BlueShift is one of the few

            skins around that doesn't have a major stuff-up in the playlist WinShade buttons—even the Winamp base skin made by Nullsoft has this!

 

To see it, follow these steps:

 

1.    Click and hold down on either the maximise or close button.

2.    Drag the cursor away from Winamp, onto your desktop.

3.    Let go.

4.    Watching the maximise button carefully, click on your desktop.

 

See?  Try it with different skins, and you'll find varying levels of buggeredness.

Anyway, getting back to how I made the skin…PhotoImpact 4.2 was invaluable—don't bother with Adobe PhotoShop, it's too slow and has lots of crappy things that don't help.  Ulead has it all worked out.  I used both the Angedelo and Fusion AMPdeck 2 skins as my templates (so I'm giving credit to the source), taking apart the BMPs as I went and modifying them to my purposes.  There are a few sections where you may be able to see similarities between one or other of these skins, but most of the work is completely original.  I know that a lot of the buttons and bars look REALLY similar, but they're just a similar style—I completely deleted them and stuck new ones in their places.  Usually, I just stuck the gradient I wanted on top of the existing button, so I got the right shape and size.  The symbols were mostly from the font Webdings, which is why "open file" and suchlike look a bit different.  The playlist and equaliser icons are my own—unlike my previous skin, I tried to keep away from lettering as much as possible as it generally looks pixelated and crappy.

 

Q           How long did it take you to make BlueShift?

A           I estimate between 40 and 48 hours (not straight, surprisingly!)

 

Q           Where did you get the cursors?

A           I made them, using a mixture of PhotoImpact and MicroAngelo.  They're actually .ANI files in their original format—the blue bit on the main cursor moves up and down, the arrows on "resize" move in and out etc and they are very cool if I do say so myself—everyone wants to know where I got them, and whether they can have them too :-)  I was most disappointed when I discovered that Winamp does not support animated cursors, so I had to take the best of each one and convert it to a .CUR—I have no problem distributing my work freely, at least for the moment.  Considering how prevalent pirating is, there isn't much point trying to make people pay for it anyway :-)

             I will probably send Nullsoft a note suggesting that they stick .ANI support into Winamp 2.62, or whatever the next one is—I've lost track; I think that the version I have, 2.61, is the most recent but who knows?  By the time I post this I'm sure it won't be.  Anyone else who would like animated cursors in Winamp, feel free to do the same.  (If you aren't seeing the cursors, go into the Winamp "Display Options" and check "Use Winamp-style (skinned) cursors".  Personally, I think the Nullsoft one's are a pain, but that's coz I normally have a little wee blue one going.

 

Q           What's with the name BlueShift?

A           Don't ask me.  I just came up with it as I was renaming "New Text Document.TXT" to ReadMe.TXT", and I thought it both fitted and sounded cool.  If you don't like it, tell someone who gives a phuk :-P

 

Q           Are you always that grouchy?

A           Nah.

 

Q           How come your ReadMe looks so mental?

A           Coz I pretty much designed it for the Winamp display window where it displays the readme in a little box—I had everything all nicely laid out in plain text format, and then I realised that it was completely buggered in the Winamp skin box, so I changed it.  Kay?  (Incidentally, it's so damn long that you have to scroll down for years before you reach the end of it in Winamp)

 

Q           How come you have no colon : between the minutes and seconds on your main window?

A           Coz the time layout the UnderGround use doesn't have it either.  Instead of writing four-fifteen and thirty-two seconds "4:15 32" they'll write it "14 15 32" or "141532".  Same with dates—the seventh of December 2101 will become either "071201" or "07122101" (and yes, their computers DO use four digits for their dates! :-P

 

Q           If you stare at the stereo symbol while it's active, will your eyes start to water?

A           Probably.  It isn't really blurry, just glowing.  Yeah.

 

Q           Is BlueShift supposed to look like "BlueShit" if it's just casually glanced over in the Winamp skin selection box?

A           No, Goddammit!

 

Q           Is that dumb little blue line on the equaliser supposed to be there?

A           Yes, it's a reference line that tells you where 0 dB is—I left it in for just that reason, coz I don't know about you but I think it looks like a stuff-up.

 

Q           Does anyone know what Spec.BMP is for, coz I don't.  I nicked it out of Fusion AMPdeck 2 just in case it was important, and changed the colours ;-)

 

Q           Did you make "Legal Stuff" at the top of this readme number zero because you only thought of it later and couldn't be stuffed changing all the numbers?

A           Yes.

 

Q           Are there any more questions?

A           Nope.  Let's move onto…

 

 

Section Four: known bugs in the BlueShift skin

 

1.    Yes, as I've already mentioned, that damned WinShade playlist maximise button—even I'm not perfect!

 

2.    Also in WinShade (man, Nullsoft needs to do a bit of work on that né?) the spectrum analyser in "Smooth VU" mode tends to cause little dumb black sections to appear at the very end of the VU bar if the bands go really high—for instance in a bassy song (something I know much about, hehe).  I don't know why it does this, apart from the fact that it's something to do with the colour of the background, coz it doesn't do it when it's just plain black (gee, I wonder if that's coz the background's black, and so are the stuff-ups so you can't SEE it).  It seems almost as if Winamp's trying to stick little wee peaks on the ends, like it does in normal mode, except they're black instead of grey.  They're only a pixel each, but they still piss me off coz I use WinShade mode all the time, having Winamp always on top so that it rests on the titlebar of whatever app I have running, which allows nice and quick access, and prevents me having to clutter my taskbar with an extra button (I just have it system trayed).  I've tried a lot to fix the problem but nothing works—evidently it's just a bug in the Winamp skin system, and there isn't much I can do about it.

 

3.    Not a bug really, but something that I feel I should explain—I know that the titlebar buttons look a little disproportionate to the rest of the function buttons, especially the volume and balance.  There isn't much I can do about that, though I would like to—it's once again a fault in Winamp.  Personally, I think I could redesign the interface a lot better—there's a great deal of inconsistency in all the button sizes.  (No offence, once again, to the good people of Nullsoft.  It's better than I could ever do anyway since I can barely even program!)

 

4.    Yes, I know that if you look REALLY closely at the position bar in WinShade you can see slight imperfections as the vertical blue line moves along—you try to do better.  Once again, it's due to a limitation in Winamp.  If I don't stop hassling Winamp I'm going to be in trouble.  In fact, if I try to post this skin on the Nullsoft site, they'll probably ban it!

 

5.    In case you were wondering, yes—the 0, 5, 6 and 8 numbers in the main window are slightly cut, by one pixel on the right hand side.  Since most of this is very faint anti-aliasing it doesn't really matter and you can hardly tell.  Here's the story: For some reason, the person who was in charge of the Numbers.BMP section of the Winamp skin decided in his/her wisdom that instead of reading the negative sign used when in "Time Remaining" mode from the little space provided for it at the far end of Numbers.BMP, they would read it from the centre middle section of the 2—this bit would take precedence over the negative sign in the far right, which would be displayed UNDERNEATH it!  Go figure.  Anyway, this is all well and good if you're using digital numbers because the two has a crossbar that can double easily enough for a negative sign—but I didn't want to use digital numbers so I had a problem.  When I stuck my nice Arial Unicode "2" in there, there was one little pixel inside the area read for the negative sign, which meant that I had to have one bloody pixel sitting there doing nothing and looking stupid.  So, very carefully, I cut and pasted the diagonal section of the 2 so that it was no longer in the way, and re-anti-aliased it all nicely.  Unfortunately, I had to do a bit of manipulation with the other numbers for one reason and another, and in the end they got a little truncated.  No matter.

 

6.    Due, once again, to sizing stuffups in Winamp, you will notice that the little buttons on the left hand side of the spectrum analyser used for double-sizing, always-on-top etc are not quite right.  A couple of them are one pixel further apart than the others—which might not sound like much but it is noticeable, especially on such small buttons, and if you put your contrast and brightness right up.  Also, when you click on the button it will shift down and sideways as it lights up, which is inconsistent with the rest of the buttons in BlueShift which only shift down.  There was no avoiding this in the end because this particular section of the skinning process is so completely buggered that I can't even figure out what it's trying to do—I just had to work around the size problems, and that was the only way.

 

7.    Yes, you're right.  The blue box where songs are displayed in the playlist window goes too far down—about enough to fit in a whole extra song.  The reason for this is that I didn't think it looked that bad, and when you small-size the playlist to the same size as the main Winamp box, I wanted the playlist blue box and the bottom of the position bar to line up, coz it looks nicer.  Kay?

 

8.    Still in the playlist (which incidentally is a complete bitch—Nullsoft should modify it so you can use better gradient effects etc), you may notice that when you click on the buttons at the bottom and they fold up, that the text in the playlist seems to get cut off beside the left hand part of the buttons.  Yes, it does—it's because I decided not to have a "reinforcement bar" beside the buttons, like the Fusion skins do, and rather just have them free.  This meant that I had to do a bit of manipulation with the sidebar section of the buttons so it's actually there, but disguised by the fact that it's the same colours as the playlist sections it covers.  You can't notice it on the grey/black, but it does cover a small amount of text.  Oh well.

 

9.    I know.  The "Auto" and "On" buttons on the equaliser are inconsistent with the rest of the buttons in BlueShift: when they're lit up, the gradient should go the other way, light to dark.  By the time I realised this, it was going to be a complete hack to change, so I left it for the more astute among you to notice.

 

10. Not really a bug as such, but I really wish pixels were smaller.  The presets button on the equaliser looks shitty.

 

11. Okay, here's a bad one.  Don't try Windowshading the equaliser and then altering the balance.  If you check the balance bar in the main Winamp window, you'll see that the little blue bars that go up and down are completely effed.  By the time I realised that this is what all those apparently useless extra bars in Balance.BMP are for, I just didn't have the patience to go through them all and try to sort out their order.  Besides, I don't think anyone even KNOWS that the equaliser can be WinShaded because I only know of a couple of skins apart from mine that have a WinShade template for it.

 

12. Still in the equaliser, try dragging a few of the equaliser bars (60 to 16k Hz) all the way down and notice how the bright grey line that the equaliser graph sits on top of disappears.  I could fix it by placing the line a pixel down on the actual equaliser section, instead of having it on the graph, but then it would look dumb.  Whoever drags a bar ALL the way down anyway?

 

13. Yeah, like I said before—BlueShift really does look like BlueShit if you glance by it quickly, doesn't it?

 

14. The equaliser window is just slightly inconsistent with the main window, colourwise.  It's a tad lighter, although it's not too noticeable.

 

15. If you have titlebar dimming enabled, when you click away from Winamp while in WinShade mode the dimmed WinShade bar will seem to grow a faint greyish line along the top.  Don't ask why—the only thing I can figure is that for some reason the templates overlap, and I'm not willing to sacrifice the bottom line of the active WinShade to remove the problem, especially since I don't even use title dimming.

 

Unless I've missed one, and I'm sure that as I post this to the Nullsoft site I'll find one more, that's it.

 

 

Section Five: bugs found in Winamp while I was making the BlueShift skin

 

(And yes, most of them are already listed above!)

 

1.    WinShade playlist "maximise" button.  Check #1 of above.

 

2.    WinShade VU problem, as mentioned in #2 of section four, above. (Has anyone else had trouble with this, coz it's the first time I've seen it?  Maybe it's just my bad luck.)

 

3.    Yes, that annoying "let's not read the negative sign from the negative sign's section" bug.

 

4.    The "Always on Top", "Visualisation", "Double-size" etc buttons have some serious sizing problems that don't show up until you actually try to make buttons out of them—unlike the Fusion skin (that guy was smart) that just uses letters that light up.

 

5.    Not really a bug, I suppose, but that problem with the balance bar being read from different places in Balance.BMP when you use the WinShaded equaliser—just why exactly is that?  I'm sure that there must be a reason, but I'm neutered if I can see it.

 

And having said all that (you can tell I'm used to writing eh?), here's a little something to make up for all the pointed comments I made about Nullsoft before:

 

            NULLSOFT RULES!!!!!!