Step 1 - Preparation
- Create a folder whose name corresponds with what you are going to call the theme (in this case, Sinter). This new folder should be inside the 'Winstep\Themes' folder on the drive where you installed NextStart (probably 'C:\WinStep\Themes' if you installed it in the default location). Now we can start designing a template for the menus. For convenience when I do mine I usually try to create one image which contains a button for each of the required bitmaps; that is:
titlea / titlei -- title bar
buttona -- normal button
buttonas -- selected button
spacera -- divider
endcapa / endcapi -- end cap
tasks -- for the task icons
You'll notice that some, but not neccessarily all, have both active and inactive states - it's up to you. I have also made horizontal versions of some of the images which are slightly different:
htitlea / htitlei
hbuttona
hbuttonas
hendcapa
Note that magenta (rgb 255,0,255) is used for transparency which I'll mention later in this tutorial. When you are completely happy with your template image, slice it into the separate button images - these can be either BMP or JPG format.
There is a full list of skinnable images and icons listed in the help documentation.
Some things to consider when making a theme are how the buttons will look when they are stretched horizontally (i.e. will texture still look ok?), and will the button colours provide a good contrast to the text you will be putting on them. Finally, consider the height of the buttons - 18-20 pixels high should be fine; going much lower than that will make your menus seem cramped, going above will make them see to long.
- You will need to create icons for the menu buttons - arrowa/arrowas, hzarrowa/hzarrowas (for horizontal menus) to indicate sub-menus, uparrowa/dnarrowa (for up and down scrolling). You also need to create an icon for the systray which will be placed on a background of the tasks.bmp image used for the tasks. (I often just use a transparent icon for this.) There are more icons that you could use, including inactive states, but I won't be using more than these for this theme.
- Create icons for the title bar - close, rollup, on top, and rotate. (Note - anyone who has already used a theme of mine will know that I rarely include these! This is bad of me! I put this down to the flexibility of NextStart - I can do away with two of them by right-clicking the titlebar to close and double-clicking to roll up a menu. Since I don't use on-top or rotate, I don't miss them. However, to make this theme more complete I've included the icons for them - closea, rollupa, ontopa and rotatea... but I'll have them turned off in the icon preferences! You can try them out if you like - see page 2!)
- Design a wallpaper which matches the screen resolution you want the theme to fit (mine are always 1024x768) and make sure that you save it in .JPG format with the filename 'wallpaper.jpg'.
- Put all the images, icons and wallpaper in the folder you created at the start.
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the active (above) and inactive (below) bitmap templates
the horizontal menu template
the tasks bitmap
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