Animated skin

I've also put up a copy of this video on Youtube.

You can just drag and drop an animation into the skin window to use it as a skin for the program.

You can also drag and drop a folder of images to use it as a slide show skin - so that the background image for all the windows changes every so many seconds.

Or you can use a folder of image frames for an animation in the same way.

The animation in the screen shot was made with the caustics generator from Dual Heights software. It is a seamless texture and also seamless in time too so can be repeated endlessly with no visible joins.

I hope these animations will help make the metronome practice an enjoyable experience :-).

What do you need to see the animated skins?

Any Windows machine should do. It works on XP as well as Vista, would work on Windows 9x too if I still supported it. Any graphics card will do fine, as it doesn't use any special graphics processing at all.

This feature needs a new computer - one bought in the last year or two - to play the animated skins smoothly with reasonable frame rates of say a dozen frames per second or more.

Howowever on an older computer you can still use it to play a slide show and try out the animated skins with slow frame rates like a few frames per second.

The animated skins are set to pause whenever you play the bouncing balls. That's because they reduce the frame rate for the bouncing balls if you try to do both at once - on most computers anyway. If you have a very fast computer and want to leave the skins animating all the time, you can set this up in the Skins window.

As far as I know, this is a world first, a complete animated skin with everything in the GUI (Graphical User Interface) animated - the background behind text and radios, spin controls, drop list down arrows, and the buttons all as one seamless animation.

You can drag and drop any animation into the skins window to use it as a background skin for Bounce Metronome Pro. Anything is suitable to use as a skin, since if the text is hard to read, you just need to fade it to the background colour - there's an option to do that in the Skin window - to fade the skin image on the fly, automatically to any desired colour.

Are there any other programs that have animated skins?

I don't know, but if there are any they are quite hard to find.

Even a background texture for a program user interface is rare with Software for Windows. That's a first step - until you can do a background texture for a single frame, it would be hard to do a movie.

I do know of one and it is a fairly early Windows program too - called ProxyMitron - still used by some enthusiasts though no longer maintained by its author as its author has died. However, it has a different texture for the buttons and for the main window. It doesn't have the seamless joins between button and background of Bounce Metronome Pro.

I don't know of a program that intergrates the two together with seamless joins and semi-transparent buttons like Bounce Metronome Pro. The seamless joins were quite tricky and needed a lot of attention to detail.

Do let me know if you come across another program for Windows with an animated skin - and I'll link to it here.

You do get movie players that show a few controls in a band in front of the movie, maybe with a bit of transparency, perhaps that's the nearest, but not really quite the same thing. You also can have animated elements e.g. animated buttons or icons, and of course icons and textured buttons are common. Here is an example of an animated button, with code.

In other areas they are more common - in flash often everything is animated and you have animated objects you interact with in 3D worlds such as Second Life etc. But I think it's possible that in the realm of Windows software, this may be something new.

Do let me know if you come across any other programs that do this. I'll be interested to hear about them and will add links to them here.

What still slows it down?

The clear buttons slow it down most. So if you switch those off the frame rates will be faster or te animation will use less CPU.

You can switch on the XP / Vista / Windows 7 themes to get nicer looking buttons still compatible with the animated skins. That works well - though without the transparency which lets the texture show through behind the button..

Next comes the text drawing. Text drawing is very fast normally, but copying a texture to the screen is even faster, maybe 30 times faster for the same screen area. With a lot of text to draw in every frame then you can speed it up by turning all the text into images and then just copying the imagesto the screen instead - transparently (in the same way the mouse and icons are placed on top of things).

Bounce Metronome Pro has an option to do that, in the More (twice) version of the Skin window preset to switched on. It increases the speed of the text drawing significantly, so helps a bit with the frame rate.

I can't think of any way to speed up the clear buttons more than I have already - but as they are translucent perhaps it's not so apparent when a few of the buttons in a window lag a bit behind the rest of the window sometimes at fast frame rates

But continue to work on this and may be able to speed it up a bit more if I notice any other computing bottlenecks in the code.