Shoutbox

quote:

---

Do not let the headline fool you, I wish I could be saying that I really do however skinning may have reached the end with Windows Live Messenger, this post is a report into, the world of skinning Live and how it may of died.

In MSN Messenger we had the ability using certain software’s to replace the resources in the main exe (msnmsgr) to modify the appearance, by changing bitmaps, icons, uifiles and the main image format pngs. In Windows Live Messenger, we have all these things expect for the pngs. This is a huge blow as skinning is useless without images, and skinners like theunknown and ipab spend weeks finding out information that could enable us to skin again.

The research discovered that a new image format was included, known as .rle, immediately we thought we could skin again by converting it into a png, editing it and converting back to .rle but low and behold Microsoft officially hate us a made the extension in there own encoding thus making this technique impossible unless we were Microsoft employees.

Our hopes were down and we began to speculate, maybe in Live a new skinning system is being set up, one that allows us to change themes like visual style do, it makes sense why else would they change it? However, after fizcials numerous e-mails to the team they claimed they had no idea what we were on about and there were no public plans to set up a skinning system. Furthermore by patching the main .exe the sharing folders feature stops working, as it needs to be digitally signed and we all know the team are extremely proud of this new feature and would go at all costs to keep it.

So skinning does look bleak now and we cannot say if there will be any more skins coming soon, the only way to skin is hard and annoying we could manually re-add the links to the pngs in the uifiles, which would make the whole process about 3 times as long. I plan to keep fully up to date about skinning Live so stick around for more information.

---