Using skins to change the look of ArcGIS Explorer

The look of ArcGIS Explorer is controlled by a "skin" file that contains XML tags defining the color scheme of the application, custom logos that appear on the screen, and so on. Some pre-created skin files are located in the skins folder of your ArcGIS Explorer install directory. You can copy this folder into a directory that is accessible through a URL, such as C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\ArcGIS\Explorer, so that the skin will be available to all clients of your home server. See Determining what users can do with ArcGIS Explorer for information on how to designate the URL and file of the skin for your home server.

You can also create your own skins or customize one of the included ones. All supporting graphics must reside in the same folder as the skin. These supporting files are downloaded to the client (in My Documents\ArcGIS Explorer Documents), so if you update a graphic, you should either give the graphic a new name or create a new skin. This way the client will recognize that it needs to download the graphic.

Customizing skins

Following are a few of the many skin settings that you might want to customize. These tags must be used under the SkinInfo parent tag. They are not included in the default skins that ship with ArcGIS Explorer,  but you can type them in as shown in the example below:

<ApplicationTitle>

The title that appears in the application's title bar.

<SplashScreenBitmap>

The image that appears when you start ArcGIS Explorer.

<SplashMessageCoords>

The location (pixels from lower left corner of image) that the connection information appears on the splash screen.

<DisplayCustomLogo>

The logo to display in the upper right hand corner. The logo image should be a square no larger than 256 x 256 pixels. The logo can be png, bmp or jpg format.

<DisplayCustomLogoMaskColor>

If your logo is not a perfect square, you can select a color to mask, specified here by an RGB value. Select a color that does not appear in your logo.

<DisplayCustomLogoTransparency>

This property allows you to specify a transparency value for the logo between 0 and 100.

<NorthArrowBitmap>

The north arrow is specified as a PNG file, 128 x 128 pixels. Use transparency within the png format for effects. The North arrow spins on the center of 128 x 128.

Example

This example contains an excerpt from a skin file and demonstrates the syntax to use when customizing a skin with the above tags:

<SkinInfo>
. . .
  <ApplicationTitle type="Application">Exploring</ApplicationTitle>
  <SplashScreenBitmap type="Application">ArcGISExplorerStartUp.png</SplashScreenBitmap>
  <SplashMessageCoords type="Application">15,200</SplashMessageCoords>
  <DisplayCustomLogo type="Application">UpperRightLogo.bmp</DisplayCustomLogo>
  <DisplayCustomLogoMaskColor type="Application">RGB(255, 0, 255)</DisplayCustomLogoMaskColor>
  <DisplayCustomLogoTransparency type="Application">75</DisplayCustomLogoTransparency>
  <NorthArrowBitmap type="Application">NorthArrow.png</NorthArrowBitmap>
. . .
</SkinInfo>