Shoutbox

Hey

As you all know the new 4.60 MP!L enables the skinner to add time-based skins, that change througout the year/month/day's

Maybe it would be possible to add a little update to this feature?

What I would like is a little pop-up when your skin is due a change (Due to what month it is, what time of day it is etc.)

So a little pop-up would popup and say something like: "The "<<Insert Skin Name>>" skin is due a change. To allow, click allow, and if you want to do it later, click Later.

And there would also be a little checkbox which would say "I do not want to receive updates"

What do you lot think?

I think it is a good idea because if there is a good skin using this feature, a user of this skin may not want it to change by time so it would be good to have that option.

Of course, the skin could be edited to remove the time-based features.

Date based changes will only be checked/applied when one starts (or restarts) messenger, so not if you keep your comp on 24/7 with messenger logged on all the time. As such I see not much use for a popup as it can't warn you between start ups.

A skinner however should think of the end-user when putting in these things in his/her skin. Think of things like the seasons not beeing the same all over the world.

To solve this, aka make the skin usable wherever the end-user resides, the skinner can/should use a boolval/multival or even a combination of the two to give the user every possible choice (turn feature on/off, choose date/date range 1 or date/date range 2 etc.).

Also remember a skin does not have the same abilities as a script, so not everything you can do with a script can be done with a skin.

i think that patchou should take the date feature further but in a slightly different way, i use a theme selector multival to choose from a list of themes, if a normal theme is selected they get that theme, if they select "365 Auto-theme" then it can change automatically.

but like you said there are things like seasons and birthdays and easter etc which are not on the same day every year, now i am told that online calendar services can give you the up to date dates so if patchou added a feature to allow services like ical to set the dates for you for each year then itd work better, also some things like birthdays etc need to be set by the user so give us something to enable the user to set dates up for certain themes based on restrictions set by te  developer.

Better English in the pop up would be needed though...

Not sure if its possible, but for the user to be able to select a date at which the skin changes would be good, especially for skins that include different themes for different days eg. Birthdays, Anniversaries etc.

quote:

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Originally posted by Eddie
Not sure if its possible, but for the user to be able to select a date at which the skin changes would be good, especially for skins that include different themes for different days eg. Birthdays, Anniversaries etc.

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thats exactly how i want 365 to work eventually. the idea is that i would hard code things like christmas etc ones that happen at a certain time each year, use a medium coding for things like mothers day so an online calendar gives the skin the date ranges for those type of events and finally allow themes like birthdays and anniversarry's to be manually set by the user, however first i need plus to be made capable of controling this 3 tier system once thats in place i will do this in 365.

regarding the limitation of needing to restart messenger to apply the new theme, maybe plus can be done in such a way that it can sense the date change and upon the date change occuring to the required values a popup arrives advising you that auto-theme wants to change your theme so if you click yes itll restart messenger loading the new theme, if you click no it launches skin options and you have to select something other than the autotheme option.

quote:

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Originally posted by vaccination
Better English in the pop up would be needed though...

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Of course, my English sucks

yeah so in my skin say it could say "365 Auto-Theme" would like to change to <Insert Theme> do you want to change now?"

then you can have 3 buttons, yes restarts messenger applying the theme, no clears the box but the theme will be applied next time they restart, and change calls up skin options so they can select something other than "365 Auto-Theme".