BlueShift SE
3.33 ReadMe document
Section 1 legal stuff
Section 2 what’s new in
BlueShift SE
Section 3 bugs in
BlueShift SE
Section 4 notes
Section 5 how to contact
me
BlueShift SE 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 SE”. 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 SE. 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 SE,
including the cursors and ReadMe files were made without any additional
templates and no further credit need be given.
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·
Just one thing: I discovered that changing the file extension
on .ANI cursors to .CUR effectively turned them into animated cursors that
Winamp can read. Took me long
enough. The cursors are the ones I use
on my home system, which I mentioned in the BlueShift-M readme. They’re really just a nice gimmick that add
the icing to the cake—pity Winamp causes them to flicker. Effectively, this skin is BlueShift-M,
which is why I simply called it BlueShift SE. Special Edition.
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There are a lot of small bugs in
BlueShift SE 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 SE. 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 SE
BlueShift SE 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 SE is too grey, adjust your monitor so black is black,
not grey. It will look much
nicer. 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 SE 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 SE 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 original 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.
The “SE” in BlueShift SE stands
for “Special Edition” as it generally does.
That’s all it is—a special edition with animated cursors.
BlueShift was originally created in
Ulead PhotoImpact 4.2, and was modified into BlueShift-M using Adobe
PhotoShop 5.5. The BlueShift SE 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 SE, 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.
return 0;
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BlueShift, BlueShift-M, BlueShift SE and Ravaj Tetralogy
are copyright © 2000 Anderson n’Swaart, all rights reserved.
The archive that BlueShift SE 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.