Yahoo! Messenger Skins

Our Yahoo! Messenger Skin articles series required weeks of research and what felts like endless hours of installing, re-installing, uninstalling... then we entered the testing and trialing phase where we took our ideas, .xml, .bmp / .png and .rgn files for spin and as you can imagine we hit trouble head on, on numerous fronts, but thankfully we had some background knowledge with regard to just what damage can be caused when you starting playing around with the Yahoo! Messenger Skins e.g Yahoo! Messenger & Windows Blinds, and with a few years of Yahoo! Messenger knowledge under our belts we were able to make sense of the madness that we had surrounded ourselves in and we popped out the other side of the experience relatively unscathed.. although personally I'm not sure I want to see another Yahoo! Messenger skin for quite some time *blush*

Looking back now, I guess it really wasn't as bad as it sounds... although at the time it was incredibly frustrating and more than a few buckets of coffee and kettles of tea were consumed, in fact almost as much as the volume of expletives issued *blush* but we got there in the end and a after a hefty investment of time and sanity we now have articles that cover Installing Yahoo! Messenger Skins, Making Yahoo! Messenger Skins and some Skin Making Hints, Tips and Tricks, we then venture into Yahoo! Messenger Skin History and whether you are just interested in how the skins have changed over the versions, or you wish to make your own Yahoo! Messenger skins, you will find Yahoo! Messenger Skin Reference Table and Yahoo! Messenger v8 .xml file great resources for information and graphic examples. We also took a look at the Official Yahoo! Messenger Pink .xml file, to show you where it all went wrong, and how to correct it, and finally we have summed it all up with a link to Our Yahoo! Messenger Skins Section (Downloads) which contains our end results.. all free for download and use :)

One Step Forward...
It all started with Andy's first version of WackyB YIM Skin Maker, a great tool for making custom Yahoo! Messenger skins in an extremely painless way that doesn't zap time or sanity, nor is any .bmp or .xml file knowledge required. Within weeks Skin Maker evolved into YIM Skin Maker PLUS++ which built on the ease and funcitonality of the Skin Maker, but the major difference with the PLUS version is that it allows you to add textures to your Yahoo! Messenger skins, again with no .bmp / .png or .xml file knowledge and you don't need to edit any files yourself, it's all done for you including the creation of a distributable file AND your work of art (skin) has been automatically installed into the correct Yahoo! Messenger Skin directory location!

A small sample of skins that we have made with YIM Skin Maker PLUS++ All the below (and more!) are fully compatible with Yahoo! Messenger v6, v7, v7.5, v8 and v8.1, they are freely available in our Yahoo! Messenger Skins Download Section Charcoal Purple Whiteout Water (blue) Pink Lines Wood

Two Steps Back...
before we ventured into more ideas for skins and "I wonder if" possibilities we had to go right back to Yahoo! Messenger v5.6 and work our way up from there to the latest v8.1, simply because we needed a better understand of what the files were and how they were referenced in the .xml files.

We installed Yahoo! Messenger version 5.6.1358 released 9 January 04, version 6.0.0.1922 released 27 Feburary 05, version 7.0.2.120 released 23 December 05, version 7.5.0.819 released 16 June 06 and version 8.1.0.249 released 28 March 07 and in doing so were able to compare the files included and see for ourselves what changes had been made over the years, all our findings have been reported in Yahoo! Messenger Skin History, our article Yahoo! Messenger Skin Reference Table provides the information side by side with regard to which files are required, needed and referenced in each version of Yahoo! Messenger. The details provided are essential for accurately being able to create Yahoo! Messenger skins that are backwards compatible with previous Yahoo! Messenger versions and will also rule out which files aren't required if you just creating skins for a specific version.Yahoo! Messenger v8 .xml file provides a visual reference of the graphic files referenced in the .xml files, a useful tool if you are unfamiliar with Yahoo! Messenger skins and it touches briefly on the font, colour and basic skin characteristics.

Pink doesn't work!
We were already aware that the Yahoo! Pink skin, one of the 4 additonal skins (Celadon, Bronze, and Gray / Orange) available for download directly from Yahoo! themselves didn't work properly in Yahoo! Messenger v8.1 (see our forum thread "I have noticed" for more information) so during our skin research I took the opportunity to take a more detailed look at the Yahoo! Messenger Pink skin.

Perhaps the most noticeable omision is that the Plugin icon is missing from the toolbar, thankfully this is easily correctly, along with some other quick fixes e.g correcting the Call button, but if you want to go making it fully compatible with Yahoo! messenger v8.1 you'll be in for the long haul... coffee compulsory. If you'd like to look at correcting some of the issues in Yahoo's Pink, Celadon, Bronze, and Gray / Orange skins yourself, whether large or small, then check out Yahoo! Messenger Pink .xml file.

Installing....ARGH!
Installing Yahoo! Messenger skins should be a painless and worry free exercise, but there are quite a few variables that can throw a real spanner in the works. Yahoo! Messenger Skins for version 6 through v8.1 should be installed to, or are automatically extracted to
C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Shared\Graphics\{skin name}
but how it ends up there, or if it ends up there at all, will depend on where you got your Yahoo! Messenger Skin from and how they have structured and compressed their skin set. If you get a little lost on the way or are confused about getting your Skin to the correct directory then check out our article Installing Yahoo! Messenger Skins.

When installing skins , you also need to take into account if the skin you wish to use is compatible with the version of Yahoo! Messenger that you are using, not all skins are backwards compatible e.g a skin for v7.5 may not work on v6 of Yahoo! Messenger and very few of them are forwards compatible, e.g. a skin for v6 of Yahoo! Messenger may not be compatible with v8.1

There are forwards and backwards compatible skins available though.. but it's not a common occurance. The reasons are wide and varied as to why a particular skin set may not be compatible, you can check out the .bmp and .png files in the skin set you have obtained and then compare that to our article Yahoo! Messenger Skin Reference Table, doing so might help you isolate the cause of the problem and a possible solution.

Transparent Skin borders... how cool!
After endless hours of research and plonking Andy went back to revisit his Cool WackyB skin, the first version had one flaw.. a real shame it was fatal :( The second version was a lot better, but it never quite looked right.. well to me at least ;)

So there I was.. sitting at my desk mindlessly humming into my coffee bucket pondering on what the heck I could do with my newly acquired Skin knowledge...

I eventually decided that I could take all the hard work out of making the bulk of the skin files required by using YIM Skin Maker PLUS++

I also knew I could have skins with a transparent border (based on what Andy had achieved with his Cool WackyB Skin version 2) all I needed was a little inspiration...

so off I headed to one of my all time favourite Smileys sites, mazeguy.net, where I started thumbing through Mike's work, and thats when the wheels started turning...

I asked Andy if he we had grass textured / coloured skin yet... we didn't but he soon whipped one up for me using YIM Skin Maker PLUS++ and Yahoo! Messenger Skin Grass was born :) From there I set about editing the required .bmp files in a v6-v8.1 compatible skin (so that my own skin would be fully compatible with all versions 6-8.1) and adding some of the amazing graphics that Mike had on offer.. and it didn't take long before WackyB Gone Fishing was born :)

and that was just the beginning of our article Making Yahoo! Messenger Skins and Andy's Skin Making Hints, Tips and Tricks article :)

MORE ARTICLES FROM THIS SERIES:
- Yahoo! Messenger Skins
- Installing Yahoo! Messenger Skins <--Next
- Making Yahoo! Messenger Skins
- Skin Making Hints, Tips and Tricks
- Skin Problems & Issues with Yahoo! Messenger
- Yahoo! Messenger Skin History
- Yahoo! Messenger Skin Reference Table
- Yahoo! Messenger v8 .xml file
- Yahoo! Messenger Pink .xml file
- Our Yahoo! Messenger Skins (Downloads)