« Announcement| Main | The Coming Internet War »
Show me some skin
One of the neat things about writing software programs anymore is making the ability for users to "skin" the program. For instance, if you click on the bar underneath each article on this page (after waiting a minute for the bar to appear) you'll see the default skin, which looks like this:
It's a fairly classic setup -- brushed chrome background with red stars for your rating selection. But there's more to it than that: as it turns out, each item on the tool is fully "skinnable", which means it can have multiple appearances. Here, for instance, is a version with more of a blue appearance:
Finally, here's one with my favorite Friday night TV show:
There's a lot more I can do here -- change the stars to other items like ray-guns or spaceships, add a beveled edge, use icons instead of text, change the textual description as you select each vote. That's the fun part about skinning: you're only limited by your imagination.
hacker
1 Comment
Leave a comment
Comment Policy: I really, really, really enjoy comments, but please be nice. No personal attacks and try to keep the profanity down to a reasonable minimum. If your grandma can't read it or you wouldn't say it in person, don't write it here. I reserve the right to remove hyperlinks if they don't appear to be adding anything of value. Due to the increasing amount of linkspam, all comments are moderated. Thanks.
Daniel Markham
I love the gardening skin! And I love the ease with which I can vote and tell my friends about interesting articles and find related articles with just a couple of a button clicks! Every now and then something comes along and you hit your head and wonder...gee, why hasn't someone thought of this before!