January 2, 1999 - Birth of a skin v0.9b

I love WinAmp, it's a great player of multimedia files.  But it's a bitch
to design anything decent skinwise, at least I found it to be.  I downloaded
CD Stomper on New Year's Day I believe, and found it to be a really good
program, and I liked the idea of being able to design your own skins for it.
Looking at some of the skins already done for it, I thought `it's gotta be
even more of a pain than WinAmp is'  I decided to have a look at the tutorial
for it, just to see...hey, this doesn't look that difficult I thought.  I
decided to give it a try.  Jimi Hendrix is my all-time favorite musician, and
I thought I'd try to do something in honor of him.  I had tried in WinAmp,
but with absolutely no luck.  Wasn't sure where to begin, then remembered I
had a picture of a guitar on my hard drive.  Somewhere. :)  Eventually I
found it, and began.  Started out by just cutting some buttons from another
skin, and pasting them in a row at the bottom of the console pic.  Worked
pretty good, but wasn't as nice as I'd like.  Okay, I thought, I'll design
some custom buttons.  Making really large buttons isn't a problem.  Scaling
them down, and keeping the detail you intended is however.  Screw that, there
has to be a better way.  Then it hit me...

WHAM!

Well, not quite that loud :)  Why not just use parts of the guitar as the
buttons?  I searched around on the net, trying to find a better and larger
image of the guitar I was using.  And where did I find it?  The obvious place
actually; www.fender.com :)  After all, Jimi used a Fender Stratocaster, what
else would I use for my skin?  And it's actually a picture of the Jimi
Hendrix model Stratocaster that they sell.  Jimi actually played a right
handed model, but he flipped it over to play as he was left handed.  Fender
did the same thing basically, but for righties.  Nice guitar, wish I had one!

January 3, 1999 - Release version 1.0 begins...

So then I started, masking out areas, saving them as the button picture
files, testing each button's function before moving on to the next one.  As
a guitar doesn't have all that many buttons, knobs, etc, I decided I'd have
to use other parts of the guitar as some of the controls, but didn't want to
put any kinds of markings on the image itself.  It makes it a little
difficult at first, knowing where all the controls are, but made for a
cleaner image.  So if you're wondering where all the controls are, here's
where I put them :

Option button - top knob on guitar body
Minimize button - middle knob
Close button - bottom knob
Stop - On tremelo (for all the non-guitarists, it's that black block on the
       left hand side.  It's where the guitar strings get locked in place)
Previous track - On the fretboard, left-hand side group of dots.
Pause - On the fretboard where you see two dots, one above the other.
Next track - To the right, in the next group of fret dots.
Eject - Far right hand side of the fretboard, final group of dots.
Continuous - Bottom string peg, not the tuning knob however.
Loop - Third string peg up from the bottom.
Random - Fifth string peg up from the bottom.

And the Play button?  Isn't it obvious?? :)

There's no Stomp option, at least not in this version.  I have an idea of
what I want, but don't have the time to experiment with it just yet.  Maybe
in version 2.0 :)


!!!NOTE!!!
When you unzip this into your Furs directory, be sure to use WinZip, and
extract with paths.  It'll make a Jimi directory, and put the files in there.

I'm actually quite happy with this skin.  I'm my own worse critic normally,
but I actually like this :)  And I hope you do to!  Please be sure to drop by
my Hendrix web page, Nine To The Universe, at :

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Underground/9099

and have a look at my little corner of the web dedicated to the world's best
guitarist, of all time, Jimi Hendrix!


Dudster
hendrix-jimi@geocities.com
