Ideas & Suggestions for future Skin making in PowerAMP

[haddy]

Ideas/Suggestions for future Skin making in Poweramp

1.) Support for skin makers to be able to use a wait screen/transition screen. E.g. in between moving between different screens of PA like from player screen to EQ screen. Use of 'wait'-like animated cursor icons etc

2.) Support for imaging Overlays over the album art area (both in player and in widget). I think this would already exist. Basically I, if making skins in future, would like to be able to use transparent PNG images over the album art area to give that 'enclosed' effect of a particular skin

e.g. like this transparent case rotated CD case effect

(click on image to enlarge)

3.) Support for '3D' skins. On the android homescreen LauncherPro app, there is 3D option when transition in between screens. Now what if this same 3D look could be 'fixed', I am talking about a future '3d' PA skin that could have all the text,album art graphics in a fixed '3d' state like this;

a 3D button control skin;

other '3D' skin create-able examples;

-a spinning CD Disc (animated fast-spinning) on a skin -how cool!!

-a 3D opened box case skin w/ 3d placed text

4.) Support for visual effects in skins e.g. Flash, Open GL, APNG (animated png) - might require additional low-level Android native coding.

5.) Support for customizable and any-placeable metadata ID Tags texts (any tags). Basically it would be nice in special skins to be able to access tags such as 'composer' or 'disc number' and display them directly on the player - along with custom fonts, text size, color, text gradient effects. e.g. a jukebox skin or a totally less-graphical text based skin > think of some of foobar2000's skins.

...for making a 'cassette tape' skin like this and use this metadata info in a custom font for a skin;

6.) Support for a touch/dragg-able cursor for skinning (just like on Windows OS). Basically if I as a prospective skin maker wanted to make a Vista themed skin for PA, it would also be cool if there was an ability to have a cursor on finger movement around the screen and too cursor waiting. Just as an option.

7.) Support for multi-display album art on a skin. Latest PA(Poweramp) versions already can 'access' multiple album art that is embedded within tracks or is in folder of tracks which is excellent. So that access ability is there, but for skin makers it should be there too in order to make some rather interesting skins.

e.g. a dual-album art skin (front+back cover at the same time) - KD Player (java j2me app);

Or perhaps also front cover ON TOP of the back cover, like this;

(if no back cover available then of course empty or something in it's place)

8.) Support for 1080p compatible skins (1920x1080p) as ever emerging Android devices, smartphones (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S2, tablets etc) have HDMI output function which means family/business users can output there whole Android onto a big screen. Maybe support for skin making with the use of scalable Vector formats like (.svg skins if Android supports that).

9) VLC has some awesome skins which I or original skin makers could convert to use on PA as a skin; http://www.videolan.org/vlc/skins.php - Also KM Player, WinAmp, AIMP and Spider Player have awesome looking skins too. These are all desktop originated- Windows OS media players. But that should not deter anyone (with permission), or even original skin maker themselves, from converting these skins for use on PA(Poweramp) as a skin.

10.) Consider adding API support for Flash (Adobe Flash) based skins which could even supplement some of the advanced previous skins ideas/requests made above :)

11.) Changing color of native Android OS UI color scheme of Black to White or another color. I am talking about for when most Android apps, such as PA itself, give user access to app 'settings'. I know it is possible to change that to white such as this;

Skin option in a meta file for this would be awesome too.

12.) Poweramp could even have a special 'Theme Zone' which would be it's own little market app where users can download & apply skins (internet required) right within PA itself. Think of the skin makers/designers out there that would want to invest in PA a little more and make super high-end quality skins and may want to charge a fee for these skins too - that's where you could step in, Max, and become a paid mini-Android market yourself and it won't just be for skins, but for PA extensions, addons, DSP packs etc that users would make too etc :ugeek:

13.) Support for scrolling text (tags etc) in the skins and advanced text effects such as text dancing, text fade in/out between tracks, text jump in/out with speed settings per-configured by skin maker or maybe even user-configurable

14.) Album art effects, ground-breaking effects ideas. Even a skin idea I have recently of Album art that would present itself as broken glass;

15.) Ability to totally re-skin the EQ screen, volume knobs and everything in that screen.

16.) Support for indicators. I mean text-based codes that a skin maker can use for his/her skin to show to users if say 'Equalizer' is enabled or if Bass or Treble is 'on' . This would be if I were to make a skin theme of a "Sub-Woofer" or "Hi-Fi player" and wanted a way of letting skin users know that EQ was enabled etc

17.) Support for on-player visualizations (e.g. most notably 'Spectrum'). I hope not too complex. I am mostly getting at a mini-Spectrum that could sit somewhere on the skin e.g. below album art. I have seen it in foobar2000's default GUI and some other media player's and it's not like a fully blown fullscreen visualization (as is already lined up in PA's TODO list). Active mini-Spectrum (or other Viz's) on a skin like on these skins;

These are all things to think of for the far future ahead in possibilities of skinning Poweramp. Thanks for reading.

[admin]

Thanks for the so detailed suggestions.

PowerAMP v2.0 skin system won't bring very deep changed to the UI, depending on how deep skin dev will be wanting to dig, it can be:

- either 1-to-1 replacement of graphic assets, font changes. This requires only graphical skills.

- layout changes. This requires knowledge of Android layout XML.

PowerAMP skins are standard android themes, it's compiled layout xml + pngs. The difference from other apps with skin support - ability for 3rd party devs to create own skins for PowerAMP.

Skin system is already implemented, but postponed until 2.0.

Thanks!

[thecolonel20]

Haddy - you seem to know quite a bit about skinning. I notice that Poweramp has sort of a glow next to the album art that glows the same color as the predominant color of the album art. I wonder, is it possible to make a skin for Poweramp (when the new version is released) that will use this same effect to change the text, seek bar, etc...of the skin to match the album art?