Below are tips and explanations on how to create your own skins for InterChat.

The Skin Background

This is the image that InterChat uses on the backgrounds of the windows. There are 4 sections. The purpose of each section is explained below. The images must be within the boxes given, if they are not then IC3 will cut the images to fit.

The logo on screen - this is where the user enters the name they want to use, selects a colour and chooses a language. It allows for a lot of customisation such as company logos.

The squares coloured in red are all used on the main user window. This is where all the users online are shown. The backgroundhas been split up to 12 main sections (plus a 13th that will be explained later). InterChat takes the 12 sections. The 4 corner pieces are placed in each corner. Then the sections in the middle are repeated to cover the entire window. The best way to understand this is to try a skin out and see how it turns out.

The image on the left is from the skin file and the image on the right shows the finished window.

The 13th section is at the bottom of the template. It is an alternative bottom end section. See image below.

When the side bar is set to off the alternative end image is used instead of just cutting off part of the image. This way you are guaranteed to have your image shown correctly.

This is the same as for the main window but this time its for the chat window. It works in exactly the same way except that there is no alternative image option for then the side bar is open.

These are the 3 status options. Online on the left, busy in the middle and offline on the right.