Creating skins
Changing the look of notes
The Skinner application is how to create skins for Stickies. These are ways of changing the appearance, and the functionality of Stickies. The Skinner app was developed in-house to create the default skin, and has been released to all to allow others to easily and quickly design and preview their ideas.
The file below includes the Skinner application itself, which is a single, stand-alone executable, along with a tutorial explaining how to create skins, that will walk you through your first skin, and also the source files for the skin which comes with Stickies. There are many more skins which are available - click the above link to search for more skins, all of which can be edited to suit your preferences.
Skin files have a ssk extension. Internally they're zip files, renamed so that they can be associated with Stickies and easily loaded, but by changing the name from .ssk to .zip, the two files inside can be extracted, and loaded into the Skinner for modification, or to see how the skin has been put together and change it.
Versions
v4.31 (March 22)- Fixed the "Justified paragraph" button (although it will need a Stickies update beyond v10.1a before it will work properly)
- Support added for altering the "bulk select" border stripe colours
- Fixed offsets for skin elements - so "20 pixels right of the center" is possible
- Six new actions for v10 of Stickies (pen widths 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, and choose 'Number in circle' pen)
- Bug fix: using capital letters in group names is now prevented, to avoid a problem
- Bug fix in skin language: vertical percentages were broken
- Bug fix in skin language: 'light BG colour' was uninitialised in places
- Bug fix in skin language: saving and loading vstrips based on scrollbar position
- UI overhaul: main dialog is resizable, all dialogs use Segoe UI
- Elements are shown grey when not being drawn
- Element groups, and mutiple layouts
- Can now choose title area tooltip text
- New "dummy" action for doing nothing
- Added "focus" to indicator types
- More button actions to support new features in v8.0a
- Stacks skinning support
- Can now paint onto the background of the text area
- New "Tile area" element type
- Support for v7 of the skinning language
- Five more button actions to support new features in v7.1a
- Fix: Save As now adds to the MRU list
- Magnifier tool window for source bitmap
Skin language version details
Skin version | New features | Skinner version | Stickies version |
2 | Initial release | 1.00 | 6.0a |
3 | "Toggle locked" action | 1.01 | 6.0b |
4 | Alpha-blending, scrollbars, button actions, style suggestion, tooltip font, unicode titles | 2.00 | 6.5a |
5 | No AA, conditional indicators, single mouseover, 3 new actions | 2.10 | 6.7a |
6 | 37 new actions, pen colour in VStrips | 2.20 | 7.0a |
7 | Paint on RTF background, tile area element, 5 new actions | 2.41 | 7.1a |
8 | 20 new actions, title bar tooltip choice, 'last sent' text option, minimum width/height now 1, center of scrollbar position for buttons and vstrips, stack support, PNG images | 3.00 | 8.0a |
9 | Groups, layouts | 4.00 | 9.0a |
10 | Bug fixes | 4.10 | 9.0c |
11 | Six new actions | 4.20 | 10.0a |
12 | Bulk select border, "selected" condition, 8 new actions | 4.30 | 10.1a |
To help warn users about incompatible features in a skin, each skin has a version number (as above) as part of the data file. If a user tries to use a skin created recently in an older version of Stickies, they'll receive a warning that the skin may not function correctly.
The skin versions written by Skinner, and the version of Stickies required to fully support all features possible in that skin are shown in the table above.