Tools for Creating and Editing Theme Components

Home > Resources > ExternalApplications > ThemeTools

Guide Written by Al.

The following are some excellent freeware applications recommended to help people get into skinning and theming K-Meleon. Each recommendation comes with a brief instruction on how it can be used in relation to the respective purpose for which it is designed.

Icon Editors

Icon editors are mainly used whenever you need to do some fine editing on the seperate images which you are going to incorporate into your theme, whether they be for the main toolbar bitmap, or for smaller collections of images like the bitmaps for the Bookmarks bitmap or similar. Alternatively you can also create icons from scratch if you're feeling creative enough.

LiquidIcon XP -Download It- -Screenshot-

Liquid Icon XP is an easy to use yet fully featured freeware icon editor for Windows. If you don't already have them installed, you will also need the Microsoft VB6 Runtime Libraries.

Some of the more important features are:

• Integrated Icon Browser for easy icon extraction
• Several useful image manipulation functions
• A set of image effects that will help you in your icon creation
• Standard set of image editing tools

Toolbar Paint (from archive) -Download It- -Screenshot-

Toolbar Paint is specifically targeted at developers who wish to design their own toolbar button graphics. It can open toolbar bitmaps with up to 64 buttons and allows you to visually design a toolbar using a wide selection of editing tools. It also includes image manipulation tools to replace colors, apply gradients and more. The toolbar graphics can be saved as 16 color, 256 color, 24 or 32 bit bitmaps to incorporate in your application. A tiny and powerful editor it is written entirely in assembler. Additional plug-ins are available that let you save a button as an icon file, add additional effects, save the entire toolbar to an animated icon and more.

Other Editors

Texture Editor (from archive) -Download It- -Screenshot-

The Texture Editor is a powerful tool to generate procedural quadratic textures. You can use them for your stunning 3D scenes, demos, games etc., wherever textures are needed. Use the Texture Editor to create:

• color texture maps
• bump maps
• specular / diffuse maps
• reflection / refraction maps
• transparency maps
• displacement / height maps

For K-Meleon this application comes in handy for creating textured background bitmaps (back.bmp) for the toolbar background.

Image Viewers/Editors

Image and graphics viewers are handy for when you need to resize or crop existing images for usage in your desired theme. Alternatively they can also be used in a similar fashion to icon editors to create icons from scratch.

IrfanView -Download It- -Screenshot-

Irfan View is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003.

It is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.

Irfan View was the first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support. One of the first graphic viewers WORLDWIDE with Multipage TIF support. The first graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple ICO support.

Some Irfan View features:

• Many supported file formats
• Multi language support
• Thumbnail/preview option
• Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
• Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
• Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
• Drag & drop support
• Fast directory view (moving through directory)
• Batch conversion (with image processing)
• Multipage TIF editing
• Email option
• Multimedia player
• Print option
• Change color depth
• Scan (batch scan) support
• Cut/crop
• IPTC editing
• Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
• Capturing
• Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
• Lossless JPG rotation
• Many hotkeys
• Many command line options
• Many Plugins
• Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like "I Agree" or "Evaluation expired"
• No registry changes without user action/permission!

The GIMP -Download It -Screenshot-

The GIMP is an image manipulation program that was originally created for the Linux Platform. This is really a GREAT program, that REALLY could be compared with programs like Adobe Photoshop and CorelDRAW. In fact what these programs can do, the GIMP can do. With all these features included the program and the best thing: IT'S FREE!! For detailed information you should ask Tor Lillqvist who made the GIMP Windows-compatible.

Throbber Tools

These applications will assist you in the easy creation of AVI files for usage as a throbber in your themes.

AVIQuick (from archive) -Download It- -Screenshot-

AVIQuick is a free tool for assembling bitmaps into AVI files for use with the Windows animation control. As such, it doesn’t handle sound.

Features:

• Produces compressed/uncompressed AVIs for Windows animation control.
• Allows modification of existing AVIs by extracting the frames as bitmap files.
• Uses project files to maintain settings between sessions.
• Wizard-based for ease of use, with extensive drag and drop support.

GIF2AVI (from archive) -Download It- -Screenshot-

Converts animated Gif files into AVI animations. Simple and straightforward to use.

Return to Skinning Tutorial