Pixuality

I’ve been a bit slack on the updates here lately, but for good reason. With the arrival of the laptop, it’s meant a whole lot more time could be spent working on my skins, and Bleach in particular. So much so, that I finally got the last “big” thing (audio/video) added properly tonight. I still need to do some minor additions (like making sure the user isn’t looking at a profile page when a video or audio call is made), but it works. The right requests appear at the right time, and it all seems to be ok.

So with some luck I should polish off these last few things (6 items in my task list) and be ready for a release so people can really find the bugs. :)

Recently Done Stuff:

• Contact List - Added a clear field button to the popup search bar. Easier than having to delete all the text in there now to make it disappear again!
• Contact List - Added preferences to the settings window so it’s quicker to get to if you have menus turned off.
• Contact List - Fixed the iconholder “…” (when you don’t have enough space to show all the medium orbs) bug. Turned out to be a bug in Astra itself which Kevin so kindly killed!
• Contact List - Made the avatar larger in the square. Was a bit small compared to the actual square area.
• Contact List - Moved menu in a fraction. It was sitting right on the edge which looked a bit ‘meh’.
• Contact List - Themed text in search bar so it’s a bit easier to read now. :)
• Contact List - Changed the look of the search bar for a more Bleach-ish look.
• Containers - Added hide button option to containers (via editing xml file) for Christie!
• File Transfer - Changed file transfer window to have no execute button if you’re the one sending the file.
• Group Chat - Added chat browser.
• Message Window - Added a “User not online” notice. Not too big or annoying - just obvious.
• Message Window - Added profile viewing.
• Message Window - Fixed width for accept/deny thingy so it doesn’t wrap and look ugly.
• Message Window - Incoming video fixing. Switch to vid mode
• Message Window - Made a new set of toolbar icons that were more Bleach-ish and less cartoonish
• Message Window - Added light version of above toolbar buttons.
• Message Window - Made a new View Profile Button.
• Message Window - Fixed user not online so it doesn’t show when an add-request comes through
• Message Windows - Fixed widget display area. It got an overhaul codewise along the way, and I didn’t notice. :)
• Notification Windows - Fixed the logo in the notifier window.
• Notifier - Made a bunch of Accept/Deny windows for the notifier.
• Notifier - Fixed the missing icon/image in the notifier window. Code changes without me knowing again. :)
• Panels - Made different icons for all the panel types.
• Profile Editor - Added Flash detection - Need to DL flash 9 page.
• Profile Editor - Got Add Web Service working
• Profile Editor - Got Add Widget working
• Profile Editor - Fixed the Mini widgets, the text was big and wrong!
• Profile Editor - Moved the trillian mini thing to the Intro page
• Profile Editor - Made some new Basic Info icons.
• Profile Editor - Text was themed in a few places. Name, services..
• Video - got it all working!

Today, after many months of waiting, I received my shiny new MacBook! I’ve not used a mac since the early early days, so this is my first time with OS X (besides the times I’ve poked around with it in computer shops)..

I’m not switching from my PC, this is just an extra tool to add to my arsenal of gadgets, but it does mean I have an increased interest in the Mac OS X version of Astra.

I’ll post a bit more of a “My Experiences with a Mac” as soon as I get a little more familiar with things. :)

Ok, so “unleashed” makes it sound like a big update, when in reality it was only a smaller one. The main new feature added this week is better support for group chats, which for those interested in skinning means one extra window to skin (apparently quite a simple one though).

There was, however, a minor “fix” that for us skinners is a rather l-a-r-g-e change:

• 5523 Kevin Kurtz FIXED [SkinXML] Support for slice inside the resize tag

It doesn’t sound like much, but in skinning terms roughly 100 or so lines of needed code were just wiped from the “to do list”.

The resize code is the one part of your skin that defines where (if you hover your mouse over the skin) you can resize the contact list (or whatever window you’re viewing).

With this new simplified code, you can make a full working custom window skin in quite a small size. I posted the complete xml of a simple custom window over at the Trillian forums which you can see here.

Although the simple skin has limited features, you can see how simple it is now to create a working skin. I’ll be updating and finishing off my tutorials in the near future so anyone can make their own custom window skins!

When it comes to IM’ing, Ive been a loyal Trillian user since the early days (Mid 2001 to be more precise). I’m not blinded by it’s brilliance, I know it has its problems and I know it’s not perfect for everyone but I like it and I use it. I have, in the past, tried switching to other IM apps but never with any real luck and tended to switch back to what I knew after a short time.

So it’s with this “bias towards Trillian” angle that I decided to give Digsby a go. I’d heard a lot of positive talk about it so was keen to see what it offered and how well it does it. As the skinning side of things is something I’m interested in, I’ll focus on this side plus any other day-to-day kind of stuff I might come across.

My knowledge is quite minimal when it comes to Digsby, so I’ll be making assumptions all over the place (probably wrong). I’m sure I could find accurate info on the Digsby website if I were to look a bit harder than I have - but what fun would that be? :) I tend to run blindly until something breaks, so excuse any inaccuracies I may include!

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On Saturday night my time (about 4am Trillian time) build 75 of Astra hit the interweb with a sigh of relief from all the Astra alpha testers who had gone without a new build for a few weeks!

New in this build was the “last” of the official features to be added: Video support!

I managed to grab my copy just as it was released and immediately bugged Kevin Kurtz (kwk, one of the 2 head developers and owners at Cerulean Studios) and asked if I could try out the video chat functionality with him! (I thought it would be polite to ask, seeing as it was 4am at his end!)

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While setting up this blog I spotted a plugin that worked in with the compete.com site (which I hadn’t heard of) so I wandered on over to their site to see what it was all about. It allows you to compare a bunch of websites and see how traffic compares for each. Out of curiosity I thought I would compare ceruleanstudios.com, miranda-im.org and digsby.com. I was quite surprised with the results as can be seen below:

My main surprise was at how low Miranda was (expected much higher), although it did mention it only had limited information about their site (is that because it’s on a .org domain??).

It’s interesting to see the spike that Digsby has created. As things go, Digsby is the most polished competitor out there to Trillian with it being pretty much a “out of the box” app without the need to install a heap of plugins to get normal functionality (yes, we’re looking at you Miranda!).

I recently posted a preview of my current “In Progress” skin on Deviant Art. Bleach is a skin I’ve been working on since the closed Alpha test stage commenced well over a year ago now. It was my test-bed for the new skinning features and as such, has grown over the development of Astra.

It’s very close to being complete, with only a few features needing to be added and then (when build 75 of Astra is released) Video chat support should be the last feature to add. Then it’s time to tidy up all the loose ends and get it ready for a proper release.

Ok, so I’ve set up yet another blog site. This one *might* actually get updated, but I guess we’ll see. GUI news and stuff is what I would like to focus on, more specifically related to Trillian Astra. But that will require a growing interest in skinning Trillian again as the skinning community at the moment consists of me and 1 or 2 others.