Scripting for the Rest of Us

You would like to be able to do more with your buttons, but you weren’t a programmer in a former life.

You have heard about it but after looking at the scripting.HTM you thought it was for programmers. It isn’t. I was able to do it with a great deal of help from Laurence Parry (GreenReaper). I would like to pass on what I learned to make it a little easier for everyone else.

I suggest that you start by looking over the scripting.htm file. It can be found in the English folder under SkinStudio. On most systems this would be C:\Program Files\Object Desktop\SkinStudio\english\scripting.htm. I will leave the details to that document. I am also going to assume that you have SkinStudio and Windowblinds v. 2.2+ and that you are familiar with them. You can go to www.stardock.com to get both.

A couple of quick notes about the format of these pages and scripts:

1) The text in blue on the left is a script. The black text to the right of it are my comments

2) Red text is for warnings and common reasons why scripts won’t work. You can also skip to the last chapter for other common problems.

3) Scripts are case sensitive. For example, “Get” is not the same as “GET”; this can lead to much head scratching and eventually to small objects becoming airborne.

4) I have provided a sample skin that contains several sample skins. You can get it here __________. The name of the scripts used will correspond to the lesson number, i.e. fade3 will be used in lesson 3. At the beginning of each chapter is a link to a zip file that contains the scripts used in that chapter.

5) When working with scripts the changes are immediate after you save them from notepad. This can save time since you don’t have to reload your skin after you make a change in a script. If you make a change to the skin that does need to reload. For instance; if you change the script a button uses.

6) Empty lines and lines that start with a semi-colon (;) are ignored by WindowBlinds. If you put a semi-colon after a command it will lead to a bad script. They are a good idea to put in your scripts to keep things more organized.

Good use of spaces and comments

Broken script and hard to understand

; Get visibility of

; button 16

GET

VISIBILITY

; Decisions

END

Get ; Get visibility

16 ;of button 16

Visibility

IF ; Decisions

END

Time to roll up your sleeves and get started.