thanks....
Is it hard to make a skin?
Well it certainly helps if you are a graphic designer as you will probably be doing a lot of mockups in photoshop.
It also helps if you have some programming knowledge as you might need to cross reference some of the python files to see exactly what you can and can't do on a particular screen.
It isn't like designing a website. Each screen might have its own individual elements that might be named completely random. There is poor standardisation between some of the screens.
The way we all start, is by picking a good base skin, and start experimenting with different graphics, moving things around etc etc. Ideally you should start with the default skin on your box. As you can pretty much guarantee all the code is correct with all the correct elements.
The Default skin lives here
/usr/share/enigma2
skin.xml
skin_default.xml
It isn't that hard once you get your teeth into it. But I am not going to lie. It's very time consuming. Slyk (which was my first skin), took me 3 months solid while I was learning how to do this. Vskin took me about 8 weeks just plodding along with no particular rush during the evenings. There will be lots and lots of restarting your box to see what things look like. Lots of times you will crash your box and will have to backtrack the work you have just done.
This Vskin I have left a lot of my helper comments in the code and also I have grouped my files into smaller files rather than just having one big skin.xml. So that coupled with the default skin are good starting points for anyone wanting to get involved in skinning. The more the merrier.... as I have retired. ;)