FireFox theme for Aston Shell. Right now it’s 1680×1050 but I am going to add 1280×1024, 1024×768, 1440×900 soon. I figured it was high time someone did an Aston theme for the greatest browser created. Open source FTW! Anyway, I tried some new things with this and hope it is liked. The only extra plugins I skinned were panel, clock and Vistabtn because I wanted to keep this really minimal.

Also, the 1280×1024 wallpaper should be included so it will look pretty good on 1280×1024.

This theme is available HERE for downloading.

From time to time people  ask me about skinning, “That thing that you do” and look at  me weird with a grin upon their face when I tell them how cool and fun it is. Ok I’ll try to make a short summery of positive aspects of skinning and being  a skinner in general.

• Fun – Hell yes, skinning is fun, it is a process of constant learning and discovering new things. Believe me when I tell you it is more fun than playing games for me, never been a serious gamer though. I remember when I bought Sid’s Mayer Civilizations IV few years ago (And I adored Civilizations 3) normally you would think I unwrapped it as soon as got home but nah I finished the skin that I was working on back then first and totally forgot that I bought the game by the time I have finished the skin. But the game was good though.
• Learning – Yes trough skinning you can learn main stream apps like PhotoShop and others much faster than by reading some book(s). I don’t say that books are bad but some of them are so badly written that can make you hate the application you wanted to learn about. more…

Most underestimated graphics editor in my opinion is FireWorks . I think it is great and I’ll make several tutorials on achieving great things using Fireworks. I made one video tutorial and placed some nice music in the background since it  will suit you better than my Niko Belic like accent
See how easy it is to make  nice reflection using Adobe FireWorks.

In the past few weeks or so I had a blast playing beta version of  StarBlaze 2 game. Now the final version is released and it can be obtained here on its own website. Game is the  real jewel reminding me of some arcade classics. Although it can be compared to old classics  game is very modern and playable and what I liked the most are the bosses at the end of almost each level and it has 30 levels divided into 5 episodes. Upgrading weapons is also really cool feature of this space shooter and it is very important part of the game. Good action, fantastic scenery lots of devastation…..  I had a really good time and have two videos to prove it

Skinning Aston2 Menu is not for the faint-hearted, it is hard, it takes a lot of time but that is something that you already know and it is time to finally  give you some useful info on how to make the whole process smoother . Ok buckle down here we go.

What will I present you here is two “anatomy maps” or “cheat sheets” and the way to use them. Easiest way  to make a skin for Aston2 Menu is to find a skin that has the layout that you like, analyze it and make your skin on top of it.

Step1

Go to the skin location (in my case on Vista 64 – C:\Users\krsta A2\AppData\Roaming\Aston2\Skins\Menu\) and copy skin to location where you want to work with it (E:\NewSkin\…or something), I’ll use my Chillounge skin so I’ll copy Chillounge.a2menu. Normaly I would use Total Commander but I’ll write special tutorial on using TC for skinning. Now extract Chillounge.a2menu by using any zip application (I recommend 7-zip ) and unpack it to for instance to E:\NewSkin\Chillounge\ you’ll see this files