New Skin
The New Skining features are powerful and easy to use. There are many different ones which will be available to choose from eventually of all different styles.
Here is an example of a new skin which I have made today called 'Minimal White'. It is only 38kb!!! This skin makes it easy to see the tools you are using and in the near future there will be an editor allowing users / djs to create their own skins but this may not be for a while.
The top area of the sampler screen
So far today, I have programmed a few new features into the complete edition. I successfully completed the missing sound dialog so that if you move your sound files (or songs or samples) around to a new drive or folder, you can point the program in the direction of one and it will check for the others. No need to reconfigure when you have to move to a new PC or keep your files on a CD :)
I have also started editing the top bar of the screen area; it will no longer say djchainz_soundbox, but will have a few (optional) features on display. One of these is the CPU monitor, as well as a filename display and some other features that are yet undecided. Here's a picture of the CPU monitor running on the latest compile; note I am still using the previous skin.
Development continues, but I also have work to do on a few other more secretive red spark projects, though these are more collabaraitve on the programming front. Till next time dj blog readers.
Alternative skin
As I said in my last post, the new version of the very good sampler software will feature new skins and that I made one today. Well, I have dug up a screenshot of the new skin for you to look at; it is basically a white, aqua and light blue recolouring of the main skin, making it airier and simpler.
Skin files are very small and contain all the graphics but nothing else. Since it is just a few PNGs (an excellent graphics format), the skin size is minimal and about 250 Kb for each. There will be a few skins with the next complete edition version, but since I want to knuckle down to getting more audio-important features in place for the next version (such as MIDI device in support), I think that skin development will go slightly third-party as well.
I would want to know if a midi note to key utility works for the program, but I guess I'll test that another time.
Dev Today
This blog is a simple "What's being done" blog for information on current developments in the programming of djchainz_soundbox. Here's the first post about this cool sampler software :)
Today, I managed to program in skin support so that all the graphics can be replaced, and then updated the main skin whilst creating a new "Ice Blue" version too. I then proceeded to edit some file-based sound/sample loading functions for when files go missing or get moved ;) The next version will realise that if you have moved one sound into a new folder, the others will probably have moved too.
I had to scrap some code today as well, that of the prototype maximising function. It wasn't working well to stretch and cover over the taskbar and in the end looked messy. A little bit of a hack that I removed because the exit button wouldn't appear either, leaving the maximise the same as in the current version (see the sampler software demo for an example).
Keep reading my updates blog to see how I am doing programming this amazing software!
