I have a technical question for those who know about creating skins for the Avast home version. Before I ask you this, I searched in many existing threads but couldn’t find any detail about it.
I’m working on a new skin since three weeks and I wondered if it’s possible to modify the font size of the tooltips.
I know how to change the color of it (the ToolTip_colors object), but I don’t see any sub-element or object in the existing skins that allows to change the tooltips font size.
Why do I want to do this? Because I want to use a smaller font for the display area and I would like the tooltips to come out the same size.
Right now, I find that the tooltips look too enormous compared to the rest.
Anybody can help? Is there an object with a precise name that can do that?
For some weird reason though, after I change the option for the font size in my Windows, it actually changes the font size of all tooltips except in Avast… ??? Hmmm… Maybe I also have to restart the PC so Avast recognizes it. I’ll experiment some more…
About my skin, I don’t know what are the rules in order for it to be accepted. So I’ll keep searching in the threads to see.
From what I know now all existing skins weight between 0,8 Mb and 2,6 Mb. Mine might not be accepted for one simple reason : it already weights 14,5 Mb.
But of course, it already contains a lot more animations and graphics. On the worse case, I could maybe make it available on my personal site. But it’s not over yet.
I expect to finish it in about one month. I’ll keep you informed if anyone is interested.
You should optimize those graphic files, that’s for sure. I am not sure if people would like their avast! to become real system hog eating bunch of memory just to show GUI. I already got many complaints about those skins that “weights” around 1,5 - 2,0 Mb… especially from those which don’t like GUIs at all (I don’t understand that, but… what can we do?)
I tried to tone down the included graphics to 256 colors instead of the usual full color palette, but the quality decreases a lot and it’s not satisfying for me.
On the other hand, I am now about finished with my initial prototype. I am comparing different aspects of its response to the other existing skins and believe me, no big deal at all. On my slow machine (AMD-K6 400 MHz) it only takes two seconds more to load compared to all the others, that is a notch less than 6 seconds instead of 4 for the existing ones. I personally don’t think it’s a problem at all. And I’m sure this delay is even less on the newer machines (generation III and IV processors).
I also understand that many people seem to dislike GUIs, bigger files, even to the extent of wanting to delete certain directories of 50 Mb on their 80 Gb disks. Personally, I find this bordering on the ridiculous. Same with people afraid of loading a static 15 Mb in the RAM when they have 1 Gb of it. I don’t feel any lost of speed on my old 400 MHz machine equipped with 320 Mb of RAM, so this is simply a problem between their ears.
Finally, I was aware from the beginning that my skin was going to be a lot bigger than the existing ones. That’s exactly why I wanted to create a couple of them : my goal with this first skin is to extend the Avast interface to something a little more user-friendly. So someday I may end up being nicknamed “the guy making the huge skin files”.
I don’t really care if nobody esle but me likes it… LOL and I will certainly use it on my PC. But I’m still in the prototype/testing of it right now. Next step will be to see how it looks and what can I do to make it look better in Windows XP with the translucent effects (those are not available in Windows ME).
Anyway, thanks again for your comments, it’s appreciated. By the way, my two favorites amongst your creations are Bionic and Laah-Ra. Also, my favorites from Martin are Red Circle and Atomic Arch.
