Skins

 

What is it?

Lets you set the textures, colours, text colour and so on. So for instance, you can personalise your metronome with a favourite image for the skin - or for the sky behind the bouncing balls - or a bouncing image for the bouncing balls themselves.

What can you do?

Just about all the colours and icons in the program can be configured as you like. So, you can use any colour of text against any background, any colours for the bouncing balls and other graphics, and so on.

You can also use any image as the texture for the skin. Also you can set a slide show for the skin (skin background image changes every few seconds or minutes, automatically). You can also use most videos as skins too - animated skin backgrounds (this is a very unusual feature for  software, so you probably haven't seen it before). All of these options are also available for the sky, the bouncing ball, and for the "sea" in the 3D bounce window.

Where?

Where do I find it in Bounce Metronome:

In Visuals drop menu. See Skins (Ctrl + 162) and Colours (Ctrl + 7).

For sky, sea and bouncing balls as images, slide shows or movies, then you need to switch to Advanced Mode in the Opts drop menu (you can switch back to Newbie mode when you are finished personalising them).

Also for the skin as an animation or a slide show you need to switch to the advanced mode temporarily.

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Colours

You can choose from a list of named colours. Or select a colour from the screen - just click anywhere on your screen to use the colour of the pixel you clicked on in Bounce Metronome.

Or you can set the colour by varying the hue, saturation and brightness with a colour wheel or square.

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Images

[DEMO]

Drag and drop any image into the Skin window to make a new skin with that image as the background.

With many images you will want to fade it to a background colour to make the text in the windows easier to read, which you can do in the Skins window. Including a fade to a gradient fill if you need that.

The image gets auto rescaled to fit the windows - otherwise most multi-megapixel type images would only show a detail of one corner of the image.

You can also drag and drop an image into the 2D bouncing balls window to use it as the sky. Or into the 3D bouncing balls window - depending where you drop it you can use it for the sky, sea or bouncing balls.

And you can also use any image for the bouncing balls in the 2D window too.

 

 

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Slide Show

[DEMO VIDEO]

You can also use a slide show for the skin. To do that just drag and drop the folder of images into the skins window.

This will create a new skin which will play those images as a slide show.

With almost all slide shows, you will want to fade it to a background colour to make the text in the windows easier to read, which you can do in the Skins window. Including a fade to a gradient fill if you need that.

As with the images, you can also drag and drop any slide show to use for the 2D or 3D sky, 3D sea and 2D or 3D bouncing balls.

For details see the help for the Animated Skins (Ctrl + 241) window.

 

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Buttons

You can make new icons for any of the icon based buttons in Bounce Metronome such as the play buttons, pause button, help icon etc.

For the other buttons, the ones with text on them - you can configure how they look. Or if you prefer the standard buttons of your current Windows theme, there's an option to use those too.

The themed buttons are untextured, while the ones you configure in Bounce Metronome are drawn over the skin texture so may blend in better with the skin depending on the skin and your visual preferences.

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Videos

[DEMO VIDEO]

This is an unusual feature.

Drag and drop almost any video into the skin window to make a new skin with that animation playing in the background. You can also drag and drop a folder of frames if you have your video exported as separate frames rather than as a movie file.

With most video , you will want to fade it to a background colour to make the text in the windows easier to read, which you can do in the Skins window. Including a fade to a gradient fill if you prefer that.

As with the images, you can also drag and drop any video to use for the 2D or 3D sky, 3D sea and 2D or 3D bouncing balls.

Several other options available with this feature - for details see the help for the Animated Skins (Ctrl + 241) window.

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Preset Skins

Comes with several examples already installed, and you can download more extra skins to use with the program.

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