SkinStudio 7 tips and tricks
Up is down. That's just maddeningly unhelpful. Why are these things never clear?
WinCustomize Forums
"Up is down. That's just maddeningly unhelpful. Why are these things never clear?" -- Captain Jack Sparrow
I'm starting this thread to post all the tricks and code additions that I can think of, (if I miss any, please add to them in this thread), as a central clearing house grocery list of things gleaned from master skins, that aren't so obvious to a new WB skinner when they start out in SKS7.
1. The Show Desktop Button for Windows 7 - add BackgroundEffect=1 to the code.
2. The titlebar buttons glow - add Framecount=1 to the code.
3. Toolbar Buttons:
6 State - Mouseover uses the disabled color. Pressed use the Mouseover color.
Toolbar Style menubar button - Pressed uses the disabled color. Mouseover uses the pressed color.
Places Toolbar Button - Focus uses the Pressed color. Pressed uses the Disabled color.
4. UIS2 Titlebar close button: If you delete all the buttons already in the template and add new ones (as opposed to saving your new ones on top of the ones in the template by using the framebuilder feature in Skin Studio), you need to FIRST save the close button image action as something OTHER than close, apply it, then change the action to close, because there is a glitch in SkinStudio that renders the UIS2 close button nonfunctional if it's saved first as close - per Vampothika's tutorial here: http://wiki.wincustomize.com/images/d/d6/050-UISframes_buttons2.jpg)
That's all I can think of for right now.
Those of you who know of more, please add them! Thanks so much. 
5. Per 2of3: Add a third image to the Start Menu Item Mouseover which will be used in the start menu expanded mode.
6. Per Vampothika:
A. IE Background Navigation Arrow; one of the arrows is 1 pixel out; you need to test it to get it right.
B. For images that run vertically - add vert=1 to the code.
C. Group Box: Copy and paste text code from header section to border section to change color and font.
D. Taskbar group menu: the text codex in menu items has to be copied and pasted into the background codex, to apply mouseover color.
7. Per Lightstar: The search field background and the address field backgrounds for Windows 7 showing and image count of 5 when it should be 4.
8. Tip to newbies: Remember to make a .wba file after every successful skinning session to save a copy of your changes in case you need to revert to the last successful version, in case something gets messed up.
9. Windows 7 Expander, if you're skinning only windows 7 -- you have to skin both the regular expander and the windows 7 expander (in both vertical and horizontal taskbars) so all states of the expander will show up on the vertical taskbar.
10. Edit Controls -->Edit Headerbars-->drop down arrows and ticks-->pressed and mouseover states are transposed (pressed is mouseover and mouseover is pressed). ALSO -- pressed text and mouseover text on the header bar are the same color, which is determined by the pressed text. Mouseover text does not show.
11. Edit Minimized Windows: The glyphs in the minimized window are all screwed up, at least on Windows 7: The normal button is the pressed image, and the mouseover image never shows up.
12. Per Neone6: When Wanting to TILE the Programs list you gotta use "StretchHorizontal middle section" in the Painting margins to get the "Tiling effect".
I'm sorry for you.