I've been skinning Trillian for a few years now, with my most popular skin being Aikon.. Aikon started life as a pretty basic skin for Trillian 0.635 (See it here). Back then skinning Trillian was a lot more restrictive and the limitations led to a skin that looked "ok" for the time it was made..

When Trillian hit 0.7x, things got a lot more interesting, full on free-form skinning came in, and the skinning language was expanded upon by a huge amount. After a long time in development, Aikon2 Blue came out, shortly followed by Aikon2 Classic LCD.

As the pro versions came about, these skins were updated to their Pro versions (Classic LCD Pro, Blue Pro).

If you look at the code side of these, there's a lot (I mean HUGE) amount of XML coding to get these skins to function, and in my opinion this complexity in itself has meant the popularity of Trillian amongst skinners is quite low. I mean who wants to spend months working on a skin, where the bulk of your time is spent coding the xml and tweaking things so it looks right in every spot.

In an attempt to get the attention of more skinners, Cerulean introduced Stixe. What Stixe is, is basically an easy way to skin Trillian.. Easy, but limited. It's basically just a colour by numbers sytem where you are replacing existing images with your own. You could do this before Stixe, but unless you had permission from the original skin maker it was frowned upon.

So the end result of this: a high amount of skin conversions happened. Popular windows themes started popping up for Trillian, but overall, in the scheme of things, not as much as people would expect.

What's stopping the influx of skins then? Easy, the lack of support for the skinning world. As much as I love Trillian and it's power, I'm very disappointed in the support given to the skinning community, especially when skinning Trillian is the one thing that would get it into many many more households.

Say you wanted to create your own skin for Trillian, where would you start? A tutorial would be handy - oh wait, there's no official tutorial around. There is one particular site trying to make up for the lack in this department, but it's being created in the spare time of some Trillian fans, and as such is still not complete. Ok, no official tutorial, I'll use the unofficial one as much as I can, then use a skin that someone else has made to see how things are done, surely there is an Official Reference for all the skin commands etc? Guess again, and this time, just like the last the Trillian fans have come to the rescue and supplied a reference as well..

So, using those things, you *might* manage to get a skin happening. You're then confronted with the reality that there isn't an easy way to check what you've done works. When Trillian hit 0.7x they released a skinviewer (version 0.10) which was an extremely crude program that you could view your skin as it was made. Again no documentation, and hasn't been updated since that release - actually I'm not even sure the official site links to it anymore.

Not very inviting for the prospective skinners out there is it? If you want to make a skin from scratch, or something a little more original than any of the win theme ports you'd better start scrounging around for any information you can find. It will be a challenge, and your best bet is the Skinning forums on the Trillian site where a multitude of skilled skinners do hang about and do know the answers to most questions.. Thankfully.

How to make Trillian more attractive to the skinning world? One thing.. a Skin editor. Yes I know it's not as easy as just writing it and there it is.. A thorough knowledge of the structure of the skinning language and how things happen is needed, not an easy thing at all - but IMHO it would make the world of difference.

I've been skinning Trillian on and off now for a while and many a time have I wished I had something to speed up the coding. Even if this editor went so far as to allow you to arrange the graphical elements on screen and spit out the needed code which you could then paste into your code, that would save a lot of time.

Something that caught my attention and caused me to spend some money on Stardock was the mention of Skinstudio's future plans to include Trillian support. I hope this doesn't go by the wayside. I would really like to see this happen, so Stardock guys - if you need a Trillian tester/helper/whatever *raises arm*.

So I'll keep working on my skins, skins that could be done in a few weeks with an editor, but by hand take months.. My current project is Aikon3. It's coming along slowly, but surely and is at the stage where the main contactlist window is basically done. I'm in the process of designing the message windows - designing for people who know what they want or expect from a skin can be hard.. But I aim to please.

I've gone the original route with the icons in the msg window - all done by hand in my Chunky Icon style.. Each icon is under 30x30, but I design them at 1500x1500.. Probably more work than I should do, but hey, it's fun..