I have a lot to do around the place and not much time left to do it… but here they are, in no particular order that I can consciously recall. None of these projects are finished yet, but some are coming close.

Two New Apps That Will Help You Skin Messenger
UIBENC and R2PGUI are two programs I have been developing in Visual Basic .NET. They are essentially frontends for console applications that I have found hard to use from a beginner’s point of view. I have made it easier to use these tools by introducing a lightweight pseudo-addon for them. The first of these, UIBENC, assists conversion to and from the new UIB format used in Messenger 9. The second, while not being able to convert to for certain legal reasons, can convert the rather longer-running propietary MSRLE format also used in Messenger (from 8.0 onwards), to normal 32-bit PNGs.

That CAD Skin I Told You About
Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on this too much. Rest assured I will get it up and running soon! I don’t think the multiple backgrounds idea will go ahead, so all I have to do is copy the substyles for different resolutions. For now, not much news to report.

And last but not least…

CmYK Is Getting A New Look
I’d had enough of the bright white and blue (OK I didn’t, I just wanted to get rid of the Wave 3 header cause it isn’t actually mine), so now I’m plonking on a nice Web 2.0-ish look, using light and dark blue, white and  orange. I think it looks quite good, and I’ve made a DP border, signature, and wallpaper out of the general design. The wallpaper I’ve not released, but I hope to sometime. It looks kind of realistic, as though it was a photo with a fair amount of noise, or stripy carpet. It’s a variation on the 724|3 screenshot background.

There may be odd things happening around the site as I can’t test php locally. It’s not a complete interface overhaul though, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

ryxdp

I am still alive! I have been very busy (not exactly) during these past weeks: I’ve had the graphics artist’s equivalent of writer’s block. So far, with my shiny new Toshiba laptop I got for Christmas with Vista, I’ve uncovered some pretty useful image resources I can use. This is the first of many more creations to come thanks to those resources.

Soon to be on CmYK is VistAero, a pretty self-explanatory skin for CD Art Display. It is a fullscreen skin for the latest 2.0 beta that, at the time of writing, only comes in 1440×900 and 1280×800 resolutions, as they are the resolutions of my PC and laptop, respectively. I will add more resolutions and I may also add different backgrounds, too!

I’m considering changing the site design, as I can almost smell some sort of legal action. I might just make a new header that’s “the same, but different”. You can’t copyright a colour scheme

ryxdp