Design Evolved Community Forum

Well its finally here boys and girls, another advanced skin for you to play with. This one is based on the upcoming batman movie Batman: The Dark Knight.

This skin will reshape your messenger into a dark, winged creation and features advanced user settings for you to customize your experience. A lot of effort has been put into the skin and I hope everyone appreciates it. This is the second shaped skin that I have ever created and I think that this one has turned out a lot better than the previous.

The skin has been built on Open Live so you can see what can be done with a bit of effort. After using Open Live for the first time myself I saw a bit on what could be improved within Open Live to make things easier for everyone else. The skin creation process has certainly been sped up for me (considering Iron Man took nearly 2 weeks and this skin only took about a week to get done).

Anyway words and pictures don't really describe nor show what this skin is capable of so its best that you guys check it out for yourselves.



Enjoy the release and stay tuned for some more skin news.

For WLM 8.5 ONLY

DOWNLOAD

Willz.

Hey Willz, great job once again...

I'm having a couple of really minor issues you may be able to help with, firstly if I use my WinXP or Zune stye desktop themes the top corners seem to get chopped off as per the pic below, this happened with Ironman also (works fine with windows classic style theme)...

Also as you can see my status, personal message and contact names seem to come up a little smudged...

Apart from that though I'm really loving it, congrats on a job well done...

Hey, yeah that bug is something that isn't related to my skin (luckily). It's a random bug in the Messenger Plus! skin system, it doesn't seem to happen to everyone so the cause is still trying to be sorted out. Personally I have never seen it, but I do know people who have so its already been reported and its on its way to being fixed.

I wouldn't worry too much because it only happens when the window is maximized or when you show the frame. Either way it should be sorted out in the next Messenger Plus! update (whenever that is)

The smudged text thing, well that was a bit hard for me. Because I let people change the colour, if someone picked a dark colour it would make the text totally unreadable. So what I did is added this blur behind it to make it slightly readable if you used a dark colour.

Course the problem is that with some colours it causes that smudge look to happen. I tried to get a balance going but yeah I already know some colours just don't work too well

Anyway thanks for the comments and stuff.

it is wonderful!!
and also matches my dark Vista themes when i use them! =D

but... you've done something very, very, very, very, VERY annoying!
What I found in you one-line SkinInfo.xml:

Pt-pt and Pt-br are TOO different, I'm translating right away for personal use... I can't put up with Pt-pt...

Edit: Finished translating it, and found what options had the same left and top values.
They are:
Id="HideCall and Id="480", both were Top="154" Width="140" Left="315", but I fixed that already in the file that's in my PC.

@Willz: haven't you got to fix them? All translations use HideCall and Id="480" with Top="154" Width="140" Left="315", then both are showing up incorrectly

Its been fixed now, it was just the Portuguese version that does it so its not going to labeled as a build change since not everyone needs to get it. It will be up as soon as Menthix uploads (maybe a day at the most).

FYI - Id="480" is meant to be Id="HideAct", that was a typo. Then hideact should have a left of 480 and hide call a left of 315. Everything else should be fine.

unfortunately its not a valid messenger plus skinpack and is therefore unusable, sorry willz.

Well i just downloaded the skin just then and its all fine. It imports and applies fine.

Check that the file size is 1747kb. Either way I'd still recommend downloading it again since nobody else has had the issue.

size is (1,789,952 bytes) i have downloaded several times and still no effect.

Ooh! hot.

Try extracting it (Just open the file with Winzip, Winrar, or anything that supports .zip) and see whats up. Usually, that happens when there's no SkinInfo.xml or when the foler (and not the content of it) is compressed