Longhorn Skinning A Reality

AlphaAlien writes "AlphaAlien of HardwareGeeks.com has figured out how to skin all of Microsoft's upcoming Windows release codenamed Longhorn. We can now skin Longhorn in the same manner we can skin Windows XP. Here's a picture of a very early copy of the first ever non-Microsoft skin for Longhorn. The only possible issue at this point is that Microsoft appears to be planning to move away from BMP based skinning altogethor and move to PNG based skins in which case any skins made for Longhorn at this point in time will not work far into the future. Also the patch to allow the skins to be loaded may not work many builds from the present as well. But for now we'll be able to hack away at the skinning engine at our leisure. in co-operation with BetasIRC.net we will be releasing the first few longhorn skins and a guide on how to get started on creating your own Longhorn skins."

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Why is PNG a good format to use?

[stecoop]

Why is PNG a good format to use? This has already been discussed on slashdot but for those of you that are new to: PNGs

First PNG is an open standard that doesn't rely on proprietary formats like LZW for compression like in Gif that is owned by Unisys. PNG has a better compresses algorithm than GIF anyway.

PNG is a loss-less compression method meaning that you open and save and get back to original data. Think of it like a ZIP file, you can always get the data back from a ZIP files as you stored it in.

PNG supports three main image types: true color, grayscale and palette-based. Good for Normal Pictures, Documents and Web Based Images.