Introduction

Introduction to MediaSkin and Mediabarre. It explains its genesis and give an overview of its main features.

What was Mediabarre?

Back to the Internet boom of earlier 2000’s, many companies offered to pay cybernauts to see ads. Mediabarre was one of them, and as a matter of fact the first and most popular in France (but further extended to other european countries).

Mediabarre was a program launched when connecting to Internet, which set itself permanently at the very top of the screen. Occupying about 3 centimeters vertically, it used this space to display ad banners.

By default the Mediabarre was in pink, with a couple of pigs on it... Quickly many skins appeared, but were quite difficult to manage. This involved manipulation of Mediabarre default bitmaps, unzipping operations and thus not very user-friendly for newbies or regular skin changes.

I created Mediaskin to manage skinning operations in an easy and efficient way.

MediaSkin Features

Mediaskin was a skin manager, with a very clean and professional looking user interface.

The main MediaSkin window
The main MediaSkin window

Amongst its features:
- real size preview
- metadata editor
- support for all metadata files formats: Mediabarre’s .def and Will&Nomaldz’s .ski
- support for all picture formats: bmp, png, gif, jpeg
- drag&drop from Windows file explorer
- drag&drop from ANY web browser: a drag&drop from a website offering a skin to MediaSkin and the skin is ready to use!
- automatic Zip file uncompressing
- automatic http downloads, with queues
- single clic skin switch
- handle Mediabarre detection & launch
- multilingual interface
- integrated help
- links to websites offering skins
- Mediabarre position modifier and much more!

How was it made?

MediaSkin was one of my earlier programs on Windows PCs, a long time before beginning my computer science studies! I was moving from MS-Dos QuickBasic programming (and Amstrad CPC Basic before) and thus MediaSkin was written in Visual Basic 5.

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What others think

«Just wanted to thank you on the great job you did with the FLAC plugin. It work perfectly with the dynamic library plugin that I also use. »

Andrew