How do you develop/design a skin?

[mchang]

I would like to know how you all design your skins for TodayPlus.
The  Tutorials on skinning is a good starting place.
I also have found the Reference guides but a bit more explanation would be nice.

I want to know things like how you calculate all the x,y coordinates;
how do you know how many pixels a piece of text is (height, width).
How do you design the overall layout?

How can I develop a skin so it is easy to add/change it later?
Can someone write a tutorial on how regions are used and how to write code for buttons?

regards
Marc

[ericsbrennan]

It would be really great if one of the folks that know how to program developed a companion desktop app that would edit the text file. Something so that you could drag and drop images and then link them to applications

[odiepooky2004]

is any program can develope the skin faster and define the postion easier? such as VB, etc