Planet Aston

Delight theme for Aston

krstatzar — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:25:46 +0000

Very strange colors for my taste but I wanted to try out something new. and here it its. Delight theme for Aston desktop shell is avery light and full of cool features at the same time. Tricky stuff was tiling that mash (grid) texture you can see in Start menu and in some of the widgets but at the and of course clock widget. You can see the full screen shot below

Dimpal and I tried to make a real clone of HTC clock and in a way we succeeded. Some more improvements will be applied in the near future.

In a video below you can see some of the theme’s features. I hope you will like it. HTC style clock widget that you can see in the video will be available with the next version of Aston.

Titanium Theme for Aston2

krstatzar — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:26:25 +0000

This is a great treat for all Aston2 users. Titanium theme is in my opinion my best theme so far. You can get the theme here and below you can see it in full screen size. Making this theme was really great experience and I applied some really cool design stuff and some new Aston2 skinning techniques.

I made a clock that had a gear (cog) in the back and when Nick Egorov saw it he said what about gear rotating as in the real clock.

I liked the idea and the result was fantastic. The clock is really awesome and added a great flavor to the entire theme.

Another cool design stuff I applied is so called “zebra table” in weather widget. As you can see I applied different color for odd and even lines and would be even better if weather widget could show weather for more days ahead.

Also very nice taskbar design and more functionality. Yes rivets are present in the entire theme and its elements but in taskbars rivets spiced it up really nice. Plus, compared to my previous themes, taskbars in this theme have more space around the icons so taskbars are more functional and icons now have more space to breathe.

All in all I am very pleased the the final result and I really hope you will enjoy in this theme.

New stuff coming soon

krstatzar — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 22:19:49 +0000

Well as some might have noticed I have been pretty absent lately but it is time for a change. Oh yes I have been skinning, I participated in creating World Cup theme for Aston2 and I have been working on several new things but have been also busy with some personal issues. Now that is all behind me and I am ready to rock, in between the watching the football games, and you will see some very cool and fresh stuff coming soon. I promise. So I will return soon with something more substantial.

Smartphone Inspired Theme

krstatzar — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:39:36 +0000

Theme for Aston inspired by smartphones GUI design took me much time and still not fully finished. I am at the moment occupied by some personal issues so I will return to this theme when I have more time. For now it includes many widget skins but I promise I will return and polish it up some more. Below you can see full screenshot and the theme can be obtained here. See ya soon.

Crunch Theme for New Aston

krstatzar — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:38:11 +0000

New Aston is released and you can get it here. It comes with tons of new stuff, you can read more about it here. Theme, which shots you can see here below is made as default theme for new Aston2, default meaning if some widget skins are missing it will be applied. You can get theme here and below are 2 sreenshots. I hope you will enjoy the theme.

Aston2 – New Cool Stuff Coming Soon!

krstatzar — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:40:31 +0000

In past month or so I have been really busy working on updating all of my themes for new version of Aston2 that will be released soon. Great news for all of the Aston1 Panel (Top Panel) fans, it is back, Well it is better than ever and I am very excited about it. It is called Launchbar widget now and looks and works really cool. Below I have attached several screenshots of it and one small youtube video that shows few more things as well.

Screenshots of two old and one new theme that I am really happy how it turned out

New Crunch theme with launchbar widget skin

DJ Hero theme with launchbar skin

Coffee Flavored theme with launchbar skin

Ok that was a just a little preview, I hope you will enjoy and like the new features.

Age of Aero2

krstatzar — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:06:12 +0000

Age of Aero2 was great source of fun in the past two weeks, had a blast while I was making it although it was a bit though. I tried not to repeat myself because I have already made several Vista/Win7 aero styled skins for Astonshell, AltDesk and Aston2, did I succeeded ? well… its on you to tell. Anyhow I hope you’ll enjoy this one, below is the full screenshot and the actual theme can be obtained here.
BTW also would like to give credits to unknown author of wallpaper used.

Christmas Time

krstatzar — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:02:24 +0000

Christmas time is my favorite and most inspiring holiday so I made one really cool Christmas Aston2 theme. Theme is available with new Aston2 version 1.6 (Christmas edition) which includes some really cool new features like RSS widget and floating widgets. Below you can see the theme in full screen with my animated live desktop Christmas Madness. I have used some free icons from Smashing Magazine which made my job a bit easier since the schedule was really tight. Also you can get two versions of static wallpapers just in case you get fed up on animated wallpapers.

Below are additional wallpapers.

Wallpaper1

Wallpaper2

To see the wallpapers in full size and save them click on the preview images.

Have fun, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Free Weather Icons

krstatzar — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:07:11 +0000

Small gift to skinning community. Occasionally when I am in a hurry I use icons created by other designers, but I am very careful about the licenses and the copyright issues. It is time to give something back so I give 18 weather icons that will come handy to anyone that want to skin Aston2 weather widget or whatever. The set is completely free and may be used for any private or commercial project. If you use it for Aston2 skins you don’t even need to link to planetaston.com but if you use it for other projects link to planetaston.com would be appreciated. Below is the small preview and the link to zip archive containing 18 png files.

Download free weather icons - freeicons.zip

Skinning Aston2 – The Process

krstatzar — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:30:22 +0000

Before you dig in to this tutorial I must remind you that this is the second installment of the tutorial that I made last week, and in order to follow this tutorial the way you should I feel obligated to point you to the first one again. I really hope that you already got your grasp on Total Commander and have set Notepad++ as your default editor. Good news is that our buddy and one of Aston2 masterminds Dimpal (Dmitry Cashev) has compiled a great Skinning Manual that contains almost all technical details that you need to know in skin making process. If there is something that you don’t understand it is most likely that it is explained there.
I hope this video will help you get started and give you an idea of how it can make the whole process a bit easier. I apologize if my spoken English is not that good, if it is hard for you t o follow me I’ll “write” it next time.