Standard View Skinning Tutorial

MC Skinning tutorial– Standard View

Skinning is customization of the software User Interface. It is based on graphics and simple coding instructions to determine how the program looks and acts. Anyone can be a skinner and create custom interfaces for MEDIA CENTER to share with the MC community or for personal use.

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Intro

The easiest way to create your own Standard View skin for J. River MEDIA CENTER is to modify an existing one. You can skin absolutely everything or select only certain parts to change.

Skinning involves making or altering image files to create the graphic buttons, frames, and icons etc. that appear on the software. As well as working with images, some modification of an xml file is required. Xml is a coding language and looks similar to html code. It controls things like image placement, colors of elements, stretching of elements, and so forth. The xml file may look daunting at first, but it is quite straight-forward once you understand how it is laid out. The various graphic elements of the player are placed in default positions, and this only changes if modifications are made to the xml file.

So, in order to skin MC you have to modify:

• A set of images (frame, buttons, sliders etc.)

• The main.xml document for your particular skin