AOL Instant Messenger Skin!
 

Har Har!

I've figured it out, and it's easier than winamp skinning.

Soon you will see a FIRST skin.

Just wait. It'll happen.

You can skin AIM? News to me. But then again, I think the linux version of AIM is on like 1.2 and hasn't been updated in a few years. *changes his GTK theme to change Gaim* whatever...

probably means a trillian skin

Nope, not trillian, I mean AOL Instant Messenger

You can skin AIM with their newer versions, I believe. They have something similar to Yahoo!'s IMVironments.

i have the latest version... i think i do at least... hrm... *goes off to investigate*

It's with AIM Expressions.

thing is, you aren't supposed to be able to do it one your own =)

It looks like a resource hog...Well...it already is. I can't imagine what adding a bunch of images to each window will do to it.

I haven't actually used it, but AIM 5.0 sounds like the tackiest thing ever. They're making "themes" (i.e. really dumb-looking skins) for it, and I hear they're trying to cram advertisements into the actual IM window. Blllarrrgh. I know there are ways to get rid of the advertisements, but... feh. There aren't any new features in the new version that seem significant enough to bother myself with.

Besides, 5.0 isn't yet compatible with AIM+ yet. [Side note: If you don't currently use AIM+, I would advise you to click that link and go download it right now. It is godlike. :D]

Aim 5.0 does have the skinning

Aim+ is god.

I run Aim 4.8 w/aim+ on my main machine

and I run Gaim on my linux box.

Remember AOL says there service (AIM) is free, but then you have to see ads. So make AIM truly free, use AIM+

if your going to use the real version of aim, you may as well us version 4.8.whatever, and use myim, i find its nicer than aim+, less resource usage, but trillian has the least usage of them all, and will do yahoo irc msn and icq

You are half wrong and half right when you say its not compatible. It still logs all of the conversations, and saves them, but they cannot be pulled up from the AIM window. You must locate the folder that AIM+ is located in, and there should be a subfolder named AIM+ History. In this folder every person that you talk to has their on folder, and the contents are the conversations named by the date. The AIM+ symbol may not be located in AIM, but preferances can still be accessed through an open IM window.

Gaim for win32! Woo! :P Better yet...gaim for linux :D

Personally I like Trillian... You can skin it, use all the main IM programs and MORE

Just my $0.02

Creating the Skin
 

When I first found out about the skins in the beta version I figured out how to make skin but it didn't work with AIM that well and only on the local computer. It did not work when people were talking to me. Sometimes it would revert back to the one I originated off of. If you figure a way around this let me know.

One of the great things about ichat:

1. It looks really sweet
2. The buddy list can be set to automatically sort by name AND availability
3. it looks sweet
4. you can see afk messages in the buddy list
5. no advertising

The only bad thing is nobody here can use it. lol.

O well, trillian is nice but it is ugly.

maybe i should just create a hacked up aim version... heh