Purblue indicolite 4 (Smoke Version)  By: expert464@piasanet.com

Please, if you have any suggestions or compliments on this skin, send them in! They will be more than appreciated!

This skin has been modified many times. Here's the skin timelime from earliest to latest:
VinceAmp, NimeAmp, Purblue, Purblue 2, Purblue 2 indicolite, Purblue indicolite 2, Purblue indicolite 2 final, Purblue indicolite 3, Purblue indicolite 3.1, Purblue indicolite 4 beta (Smoke Version)

This skin was made entirely on MsPaint from an old skin pack I got from winamp.com I got around the v2.4 ages. There was not even an AVS skin back then. Please appreciate this skin, as unlike most skins, it was NOT made with a skin program, or anything that would make graphics for you. This was made entirely by hand, pixel by pixel, on MsPaint. It may not be as graphic or as flashy as most skins, but I dont think anyone else can do better than this using only MsPaint at 8x magnification.

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New in Purblue indicolite 4 beta (Smoke Version) (Submitted to winamp.com and deviantart.com on September 17th, 2002)
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In the middle of creating PBi4, I decided it'd be neat to do things a little differently. I wanted to go beyond the limits of blue and purple and one night it came to me that I could make a grayscale version. Seemed simple enough, and it was. Despite a few modifications to the playlist and main window, the process went 100% smoothly. Even though the skin was never intended to be viewed in grayscale, some of you may hate the fact of having a blue and purple skin on winamp, and prefer a more classic-type dark skin, so here you have it. I wont put any changes in PBi4 because as of this release, it is not finished yet, think of this as a beta test of PBi4.

Also note, that I removed the fancy blue cursor that is usually in my skins, mainly because I no longer have a bitmap to icon program to make a new one, and the blue cursor would look retarded with a grayscale skin. Don't think that I've gotten rid of it.

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New in Purblue indicolite 3.1 (Submitted to winamp.com and deviantart.com on March 26th, 2002)
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-3.1 is what 3 would've been if I hadn't have given up on it and ran out of ideas. Three months was enough time for me to get my creative skills back and finish what I started: a complete re-doing of the skin. (Dun dun dun!)
-Biggest changes are the removal of all black (the addition to the purple and blue that SHOULD be there in the first place) and definately the Equalizer window. I needed to re-work that for a long time, and its very basic right now, but at least I have something to build from.
-Tons of small changes in the main window. I went for detail, from adding that blue streak in the upper left, to deleting ONE pixel line on the song scrolling text so things would fit better. A lot of "Why did I do that in the first place?" type questions were answerred.
-Stupid mistakes fixed. For instance, in the equalizer, I had two "+20 db" texts. Rightfully changed the bottom one to "-20 db". Also some texts werent colored in all the way.
-Playlist and Minibrowser remain almost untouched, because I still dont really have anything new to go there besides some text fading. (Plain colors? Eeeeewwww!)
-Added a new cursor, old one looked gay, especially since the skin looks a lot better than it used to when the cursor was made.

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New in Purblue indicolite 3 (Submitted to winamp.com on January 23rd, 2002 (Deteled it because it was not published by the time 3.1 was finished (A WHOLE 3 months.. wake up winamp.com!)). Posted on deviantart.com on March 5th, 2002)
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-More lightening up, went though about 4 phases of lightening the text. If you still have older versions of Purblue, you can REALLY tell how much brighter the text is. I don't know how I let it get so dark in the first place.
-Most obvious changes are the addition of faded color where black spots used to be. Makes it look fuller and more 3D-ish. The changes in the titlebars alone took a couple hours, because the "active" and "inactive" titlebars use the SAME line of color. This is why the corner isnt rounded when you minimize the main titlebar and it is when it's opened.
-I really screwed up the Balance bar on the main screen, and couldnt fix it back.. so live with that ugly bar for now. I don't think many people use the balance in winamp anyway.
-Changed the buttons and surrounding graphics to the left of the time/"spectrum analyzer" to that stupid teel/white fading streak that's there now. It looks stupid, but if you saw what I had there before, you'd be impressed.
-Reworked the entire Playlist window, finally satisfied with the buttons. Also fixed a problem with a peice of the song window border near the scroll bar, very annoying if you pay attention to flashing things that arent supposed to be flashing.
-Re-did most of equalizer window, putting some wavy thing in the backround and some different buttons along with adding lightbulbs to tell intensity of the equalization.. or whatever.
-Skinned the minibrowser to fit the rest of the windows with the blue fade. Nothing special, I hardly use the minibrowser so it gets the least of my attention.
-I thought this was a rather interesting fact. I seemed to have skinned so much more new stuff into Purblue 3 than other versions, that the total filesize of pbi3 rose 28% from pbi2F. Pbi2F was only 1.02% larger than the original purblue.

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New in Purblue indicolite 2 final (Published at winamp.com on May 24, 2001)
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-Made LOTS of corrections on spellings. I found about 10 in this readme alone. I even mistakenly had "Base ----- Treble" in the equalizer screen instead of "Bass".. jeez what I moron I was.
-Lightened up the skin. The previous version was very dark (even darker than it is now). If I didnt put lighter colors over darker ones, I just gave up and re-did the entire area.
-Again, re-did the equalizer screen. I am never satisfied with it, but now I think I'll stick with it for a while.
-Check out my mono/stereo thing, thats the best thing I love about this skin.. hehe!
-Put a little chrome-like thing behind the buttons on the main screen, looks better than just black. It also took about 2 hours to get the buttons to lay on the backround perfectly. Editing from MSPaint is NOT easy!
-Changed the minimized menus around a little to my liking, notably the "It really whips the llama's ass" title, that you'll probably never see because I dont know when it comes up, but its skinned anyway.
-I swore to myself at the end of the previous skin that I was to skin no more until WinAmp3, well.. since its been about 6 months since then, and still NO signs of a WinAmp3 release near (as of May 19th, 2001), I got bored, and have released THIS, as my absolute final skin for WinAmp 2.

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New in Purblue indicolite 2 (Published at winamp.com on January 17, 2001)
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-Redone main screen, looks like an actual skin now and not some beginners project. Scratch that, it is a beginners project, but now its a beginners project with style.
-Ok, fine, just a little style though..
-Made various improvements to almost the entire skin.
-Made a non-annoying cursor. I usually disable cursors because most skinners dont make cursors, or their cursors look stupid. I simply took the windows 3D cursor and made it blue and black, so it actually looks decent.
-Ok, fine, just a little decent though..
-Instead of having sequels to my skins, I'll just name them something different, this way if you dont like a certain skin, the old version will still be in winamp.com's directory. And I get to have more than one skin in there. Yahoo for all of us! Plus I think "Purple indicolite" looks cooler than "Purblue 2.1" or "Purblue 3"
-P.S. "indicolite" means a mixture of blue and indigo.

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New in Purblue 2 indicolite (Published at winamp.com on January 8, 2001)
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-I seemed to have missed a readme update on this version, maybe because the next release (the similarly named Purblue indicolite 2) was less than 10 days away from publication. Nonetheless, I added it here to complete the timeline of updates.

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New in Purblue 2 (Published at winamp.com on October 19, 2000)
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-Touchups here and there
-AVS bmp was not in my skin, so I stole a copy from winamp.com so its now skinned.
-Stinking equalizer section finished nicely.. and now the bars dont look gay. They now look slightly better than gay.

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Known Problems and Issues (Reguards all versions of Purblue)
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-Problem with moving around of maximize arrow (pointing down) on the minimized playlist screen. Not only does it move, its also not skinned properly, because for some reason the playlist window does not use its own minimize/maximize "arrows". I have no idea what window it pulls them from, and I dont feel like changing all the arrows so they look exactly the same because the backround behind all the arrows (both up and down) are different. This problem may or may not occur, actually.
-Unable to make rounded edges of minimized main window. Addressed in the changes to Purblue 3, it seems the inactive and active minimized main window uses one same line of color, that prevents me from changing it because I have to make it work both ways. Possibly just an old skin pack problem.
-Abnormally large slider buttons. Yes, I know the sliders on any version of Purblue downright suck, the fact is, once you make the slider buttons that large, they stay that way, and since I prefer to fill in most black spots with little purple/blue images, I am forced to let them stay as hideously large buttons. The balance bar not only looks bad, it's also too small for the cover area, and doesn't work with the "sun lines" in the backround at all. It's only 2 pixels, but it's there.


Is this readme too large? Probably, but listing the problems with the skin packs and telling you everything I do to make this skin better and better is my way of showing you that making a skin using the old school method isnt easy. People may use a skin program, or Adobe Photoshop, or another drawing tool to make awesome color fades, backround images, transparencies, mouse cursors, and smoothed lines/text. Do I use any of these? No. I used a Nullsoft Winamp 2.4x (estimate) skin pack and have edited every pixel of color using MSPaint with 8x magnification. Is this a better way to make skins? In the long run, probably, but its definately not easier. But its my way of doing things, and I hope it's made this skin stand out more. Enjoy it!