Tips & Tricks
Get the most out of Yahoo! Messenger
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Instant Messaging: Yahoo! Messenger Central
How to Skin Yahoo! Messenger
by Xerraire of MXskinz.com
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Barbara Lopez, aka "Xerraire" is a resident
of Maryland, USA, where she is a homeschooling mom of three, web
designer, also from home, and owner of
For a basic skin of Yahoo (it can get more complicated) you need to create a total of 11 images. They need to be in .bmp format. The main background can be a tileable image or one like you see below for my Lord of the Rings Yahoo skin. This one is sized at 210 pixels by 400. Yahoo has buttons as well. To skin each button, you can create an image for each of them at 48 x 28 pixels.
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Naming each
image is
very
important. Below each image
above is the
Once all these images have been created, place them in a folder, perhaps Once you have the folder with your images named and placed in the correct place in Yahoo, you can open Yahoo, go to Login - Preferences - Appearance - and in the drop menu where it says Current Theme, click on the arrow until you see the name of your skin folder. Click OK, then the program will have your skin! Yahoo skins are by far the most popular at MXskinz. Let me know how you are doing. When you've completed your skin, submit it to Skinsgallery.com! |
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Note that if you want to make buttons with transparent areas, they must be saved as 256-color (8-bit) bitmaps. Anything using RGB values of R:255 G:0 B:255 (hex #FF00FF) will be translated by Yahoo as transparent. |
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Additional Resources - Image Editors
- Paint Shop Pro offers a free, 30-day evaluation.
- Adobe Photoshop is the professional image editor, and it's what we use here at BigBlueBall. Buy it on Amazon.
- Ulead Photo Impact is often discounted at local retailers.
- and the free GIMP, which offers versions for Linux, Mac, OS2 and yes, even Windows.
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