Designing Skins

GetRight 4.2 includes skins for the download window. Get it here!

See also Advanced Skin Design for GetRight 4.3!

GRS Files:

Getright Skins are stored as GRS files. These are regular ZIP files with the extension renamed to GRS. To view the contents of a GRS file, rename the file to ZIP and then view the zip file.

The GRS (ZIP) file needs to contain two compressed files:

1. skin.bmp
2. skin.ini

Skin Preview Utility

Mike Sutton (from Edais Designs, the guy who did these cool skins) has created a cool little app to help skin designers test their work. This can really help making sure the buttons line up, etc.
Version 1.2 can now adjust the skin.ini file as well. Includes a text color selector.
• GetRight Skin Preview 1.2 (135 k)
• Microsoft VB 6.0 Runtime Files (required - 1037 k)

skin.bmp

The skin.bmp is a bitmap file containing all the graphics for the skin. Click here for a template.

NOTE: 24bit "true-color" bitmaps will not work with Windows 95 or 98 (they will with ME, 2000, XP). To ensure that everyone can see the skin, convert the SKIN.BMP file to 8 bit (256 color) or less.

skin.ini

The skin.ini file contains information for the skin such as text color and other options. Here is a sample:

[Colors] TEXT_RGB=0xFFFFFF TITLE_RGB=0xFFFFFF INACTIVE_TITLE_RGB=0xFFFFFF BUTTON_RGB=0xFFFFFF BUTTON_DOWN_RGB=0xFFFFFF TEXT_SHADOW_RGB=0xFFFFFF [Options] TRANSPARENT=1 SHADOW=0 [Offsets] TITLE_X=0 TITLE_Y=0 [Author] SKIN_NAME=Cool Skin NAME=Your Name URL=http://www.getright.com

[Colors]
The Colors section sets the color for all the text used in the skin. This uses Hexadecimal RGB notation. If you need help finding a color's RGB value, check out this web site.
0xFFFFFF is white.
0x000000 is black.
0xFF0000 is red.
Etc...

[Options]
Currently, there are only two options which can be set here:
TRANSPARENT: This tells Getright whether to use transparency or the standard rectangle shape. If you set this to zero on a skin that doesn't use transparency, the skin will render a bit faster.
SHADOW: This tells GetRight whether to use a shadow on the text. This can make text stand out better against some textured backgrounds.

[Offsets]
If you need to change the location of the title in the title bar to accommodate your skin, you can move the title by adjusting these values. An extreme example of this is this skin which moves the title down into the main body of the skin (the bold text right above the progress bar.)

[Author]
Give yourself Credit.
SKIN_NAME will set the default name used when someone downloads the skin.