Tweaking the visual styles

Now that you have finished changing the visual styles using one of the two methods that I
described, you can customize the look of your computer a little more by tweaking the visual
style. One thing that I always like to customize after I change the visual style is the title bar
height. You can easily do so by changing the window metrics:
1. Right-click the desktop and select Properties.
2. Then, click the Advanced button on the Appearance tab.
3. Click either the active or inactive title bar of the preview image and then adjust the Size
setting next to the Item drop-down box.
4. While you are changing the size, you might want to also customize the fonts. You can do
so by clicking the text for which you want to change the font, and then selecting the font.
5. Click OK to save your changes.
6. Click OK once more to close Display Properties and activate the new changes.

Customizing the way a visual style looks is always refreshing. Usually when you install any sys-
tem, you find a few things that you wish were just a little different. Now you know how to
refine your desktop to look its best.

Making your own visual styles
You now know how to install and use custom-made visual styles, but did you ever wonder how
other people make visual styles? This next section will take you through the process of creating
your own visual style as well as the history of how people started making them.
It all began before people could actually use the visual styles. Curious users snooping around
their Windows XP files discovered that Windows XP had a skinning engine just like many
other applications that had the whole look of the operating stores in a file on the hard drive in
the themes folder called luna.msstyles. This file contains all of the data for the new
Windows XP look.
Then, just as with the boot and logon screens, people started to use resource hacking tools such
as Resource Hacker to open up luna.msstyles and replace the bitmaps stored within the
file with image files they made. Additionally, you could use programs like Resource Hacker to
edit the settings files stored within the visual style as well to edit all of the sizes of the different
Windows components.
The possibilities that applications such as Resource Hacker gave users were unlimited, except
for the fact that there still was no way to test and use the new user-made visual styles because
they were not digitally signed by Microsoft. Eventually, that all changed, as you know from the
last few sections, and users were able to use their own visual styles.
Now there are several different ways that you can make your own visual style. You can use the
Resource Hacker approach and manually open up your luna.msstyles file and replace
bitmaps in the file with ones you made yourself. This process can be a very long and difficult
one when you are trying to design a completely different visual style. This method would really
only make sense to use if you just wanted to replace one part of a visual style, such as the green Start button.

If for some reason you just don’t like the green Start button, then you can open up the file in
Resource Hacker and look for the bitmap on which to work. First, you will probably want to
extract the bitmap from the file so that you can work on it in your favorite image editing
program. Then, once you are finished, just replace the bitmap in the file with your modified
version. Hit Save As, give the file a new name, and you are finished once you create a new
folder for the name of the visual style.
If you want to make a completely new visual style with a new look or modify an existing one
beyond changing one little component, then using a commercial editor is a must. TGT Soft,
the company that brought you Style XP and the first patch for the visual style engine, has come
out with an editor known as StyleBuilder.
StyleBuilder is an amazing program that TGT Soft created after they found out how the visual
style file was compiled. It provides the user with an easy-to-use visual front for editing the
visual style files. Instead of using a resource hacker and searching for a specific bitmap to
replace, you can just navigate through the menus and click the object that you want to replace
within the editor. This saves a lot of time and makes it feasible to create a whole visual style
from scratch.
To get started, download a copy of StyleBuilder from TGT Soft’s Web site, located at
www.tgtsoft.com/download.php. Sometimes, the best way to learn something is to start
by modifying a visual style. Once you download and install a copy of StyleBuilder, perform the
following steps to learn how to import an existing visual style, make changes to it, and then
save it for use on your computer and distribution on the Internet:

1. Start up StyleBuilder by navigating though the TGT Soft folder in the Start Menu and
selecting StyleBuilder.
2. Say that you’d like to import the iBar 4 visual style that you use on your computer and
want to make some changes to it. When StyleBuilder is starting up, click the File
Menubar item and select the Import .msstyle file.
3. Next, you will have to fill in the two boxes on the import window. Specify the .msstyles
file of the visual style that you want to import to modify. Then specify the folder that you
want all of the settings and images to be extracted to so that StyleBuilder can edit the
files.
4. When you are finished filling in the two boxes, hit the OK button to start the import
process.
5. After a few seconds, the import should be done and you will be notified if the import has
been successful or not. If it has, you will have the option to open up the newly created
StyleBuilder files to edit the visual style. Click the Yes button so that you can edit the
files.
6. StyleBuilder will now open up the imported visual style for editing. First, get familiar
with the interface. Figure 4-10 is what the StyleBuilder interface looks like when you