Just wondering if there’s any documentation on making your own avast! skins?
There’s a whole community of people out there that would probably love to skin a quality antivirus like avast! Particularly since it is free-form skinnable.
We’d very much like to write a document with step-by-step instructions on how to make avast skins. However, no such thing exists at the moment, sorry. :-\
However if you’d be willing to do some ‘spelunking’, you can start with one of the avast default skins and try to replace the bitmaps and regions etc. It’s not so hard, in fact.
We’re using the ActiveSkin toolkit from SoftShape. You can download the ActiveSkin SDK from here: http://www.softshape.net/download/activeskin.zip . It includes a pretty nice interactive SkinBuilder in which you can open the avast skin files (*.asws) and quite comfortably edit them.
Of course, the quality of the skin depends greatly on the artwork (which must be prepared in a different program such as Photoshop) but given your original posting it’s probably pointless to tell you this stuff - you know what it’s about, right… 
Anyway, have fun!
Vlk
I will look into it as soon as i get some time. thx!
Any suggestion for a freeware?
Is it posible to hand the avast! skin with another software? 
Any suggestion for a freeware? Is it posible to hand the avast! skin with another software?
Well I guess you can use ActiveSkin in trial mode, AFAIK.
Otherwise, no chance for freeware (or any other) app - the skin format is ActiveSkin’s proprietary…
It’s a lot of work to make a quality skin, anyway
Vlk
Call me stupid, but I can not open the avast skin files with skinbuilder… It allows me to open .skn files and renaming the avast files won’t work… I am probably forgetting something very stupid, but please tell me how to open the skins…
Peter
Your probably opening the .aswcs files downloaded from the web instead of .asws files located in \data\skin.
aswcs stands for ASW [Alwil Software] Compressed Skin, as opposed to asws - ASW Skin. You see the difference?
Vlk
You were probably right ;D I managed to open the fil and was baffled by what I saw… You allready mentioned it being time consuming. After examining the contents I developed a deep respect for the guys that create the skins : I will give it a try, but I am affraid I am too impatient to create a good one…
Peter
ok guys and girls,
I created all avast! skins. So what can I do for your easier insight how to create avast! skin?
I could place one of the skin in PSD file on the web. You will able to download it and look inside this PSD files, where you will find everything what is need for create avast! skin. Then if you don’t know how work with ActiveSkin, you can send me your PSD file and I finished it in ActiveSkin.
The last possibility is, that I create short document “How to create skin in ActiveSkin”
Novak
Yeah, that’s true… and what’s that what makes me the happiest man in the whole wide world ? The fact that I am the first (additional) skins designer for avast! ever. Martin N. started everything, but remember, he is part of the Alwil bunch, and I’m just another freelancer…
Cheers!
Novak, to whom are the skin Zygote dedicated? 8)
I found the phrase: A new fancy bio-skin for all techies and technicals! at the web (http://www.avast.com/i_kat_71.html).
Does techie has notice this? ;D