Day: November 15, 2006

FOLLOW-UP: BOINC Manager Skin Specifications posted

What about PNG alpha channel on skin elements? For example, transparent elements on the “workunit background” should let the main GUI background seen through.

We need to investigate what is going on their. I’ll let you all know as soon as we find something out.

I would like to modify an existing manager skin like the wcg. I would only like to change some of the background graphics to brand for my BOINC team “Team ACC – Arthur C Clarke” I don’t want to change any of the buttons, tabs, etc.
How can I get a complete skin including the graphic files? With that I could replace only the couple of pieces I need.

This actually turns out to be easier than it sounds.

First off the skin manager attempts to load whatever was defined in the skin.xml file, if it can’t find the file it defaults to the BOINC default image for whatever it was looking for. So that means for your skin.xml file all you would need to define is the background image tag like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<skin>
  <en>
    <simple>
      <background_image>
        <!-- Background Image for the Simple GUI-->
        <!-- 410x540 -->
        <image>
          <imagesrc>graphic/simplegui_bg.png</imagesrc>
          <background_color>133:181:178</background_color>
        </image>
      </background_image>
    </simple>
  </en>
</skin>

So you could have a directory layout that looked like this:

+ BOINC
|
+----+ Skins
     |
     +----+ Team ACC
          |
          + skin.xml
          |
          + graphic
          |
          +---- simplegui_bg.png

World Community Grid’s skin files can be found here:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/boinc/clientgui/skins/World%20Community%20Grid/

BOINC’s default skin template files can be found here:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/boinc/clientgui/res/templates/skins/

I hope this helps.

—– Rom