Creating Theme with the UIS2 format is much easier to do than a UIS1 format is -- at least once you figure out how to do it.
I have found in creating skins for it that if you don't take the right steps, it is virtually impossible to get a theme that works like you want it to. And, a badly created theme can actually make your system unstable quite immediately after using it.
If you follow these steps, you'll find that creating a theme for WindowBlinds is very easy.
Step 1: Create a mock up of what you want your finished window to look like.
What I do is take a screenshot of Notebook with Paint Shop Pro and then using Corel Photopaint (any paint program will do) I begin changing my screen shot to look how I want the window to look.
Step 2: Carve up your screen shot into 4 pieces: Top, Left, Right, and Bottom. Be careful that there is no overlapping parts.
Step 3: Create a menu bitmap.
Step 4: Take those 4 pieces and create 4 bitmaps with them. You'll need to modify these bitmaps so that they have an active and inactive bitmap. What I do in Corel Photopaint is simply double the size of the paper size (not the bitmap itself) and copy and paste the original bitmap. Then I modify this new bitmap (I usaully just make the inactive one a little darker but you could actually create a full blown new style). For instance, on the top.bmp what WindowBlinds does is simply read in the full bitmap and then chop the bitmap in half and takes each half to be the active and inactive portion.
HINT: If you create your theme and it looks really screwed up, go back and check to make sure you remembered to include an inactive version in each bitmap. I've forgotten many times and become pretty frustrated because it's not apparent when you run the theme (it just looks messed up or crashes or hangs your system).
Step 5: Create the buttons.
You can create as many buttons as you want and you can place them pretty much where you please. Though for now we'll stick with buttons that are kind on the top of your window. Each button bitmap has all 3 states in it: Normal, pressed in, disabled. Some themes will have 6 buttons states which are the original 3 plus the 3 you see when that window is inactive.
Step 6: Edit the UIS file.
I just take an existing one (such as sample.uis) and edit it with Object Edit. The first thing I do is rename it to whatever I want to call my theme. Then I do a replace all on the original name to the new name (like replace "sample" with "supertheme"). Read the sample.uis file for more details on creating it. Placing buttons can be tricky because you have to take into account the *absolute* coordinates you want them. Which means you have to take into account the thickness of your borders you've created when you give the UIS file your coordinates.
Step 7: Test and fix.
Odds are, you won't get it quite right the first time. If you get a system hang or some other really bad behavior, check to makes ure you haven't goofed up the toptopheight or topbotheight (that's something I did many times). If you make their values too high, you can actually overlap the window memory which can create system hangs -- your system will experience them pretty quick. Also make sure you've created the multiple states in the various bitmap files if thigns don't seem right. If your windows edges don't align right, you'll probably need to edit them again. It's pretty tricky to get that right when you're just starting out but if you follow the guidelines here, it should be much easier to get right.
You're done. Now hopefully your theme will look better than the ugly one I created... :)
The future:
There are lots of things we expect to add in the future and some of it you can see in the UIS file. Of course, stability is very important to us and it has to come first. We have been pretty conservative in our version useage until we have it more stable.
Please send your themes to us onto our FTP site: ftp.stardock.com /incoming. We'll put them up.
Other good places are www.customize.org and www.skinz.org.
