Hi SZ, thanks for your reply.

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. :wink:

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”. :stuck_out_tongue:

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.

That’s about it for now. :slight_smile: