SynstrShn Wrote:So there are guys like me out there! haha.
Of course there are. There are 66,000 people subscribed to this forum. 6700 active. How many skinners? 25? 50? (who the heck really knows, I bet there are people coding for themselves and coming out of the woodwork only when they have something important). So maybe one in 130 is a way off prediction?
But the problem is a different one: you need somebody with xml skills and somebody with graphic (read Photoshop) skills. The probability a person would have both of these talents is scary slim. Hence the team working and it's still taking months (half a year?) to come up with something great.
Most often one gets the "read the wiki, check Confluence, check the empty skin" advices. All good ones. But they are not going to cut it. Quite a shame, that wiki is one of the best wiki I've seen for a technical project (the hours and patience to put that together, alone commands respect). But the imagination of this community will never be truly leveraged until skinning becomes easier, or at least faster (the coding part). Right now it's more or less a case of (paraphrasing, adapting)
"from the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. From the inside looking out, we can’t explain it".
You either crack the logic of the code on your own, or go do something else, fly a kite or something.
What I'd suggest is, for the skilled skinners and the other people in the knowing, to write down a structural guide, how to code a skin. "You begin
here" (I don't know - Home.xml) then you can go "there" (possible next XML files, just examples not all of them), and outline every time if this "there" can be something totally new ("at this point whatever you have in your window can be further customized with your own invention of customized xml - customize1.xml or whatever). And so on. If this can't be done because the flexibility of the skin engine is that great, the the said flexibility is starting to have negative effects on plain creativity.
Something with logic for regular people, not for people used to do programming (I can't emphasize this part enough, consider it blinking pink).
I don't know how to skin. I'm learning. Because of that maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm a Photoshop guy. I understand XML but I am not
creative with it. So as far as I'm concerned I can say there is a huge gap between how my brain is wired and how the the brain of a programmer is wired (I have one next to me at work, he did some tools in .net for me, for XBMC). And currently there is no bridge over this gap.