Googling Magazine: Personalize themes of the new Google Talk : Mobile Edition

Published on 2006-04-08 11:01:12

The new version previously announced and which have been officially released yesterday have a very interesting feature which is the possibility to change the appearance of chat windows. This feature could be easily customized thanks to its very easy application design.

http://googling.phpmagazine.net/upload/2006/04/gtalk-themes-thumb.jpg

The themes could be founded under C:\Documents and Settings\[current_user]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\themes\system\chat. You can simply copy an available theme and change it to create your own. The main file to change is main.css. Kyle Hayes have an excellent explanation of the file and how it could be changed :

A little explanation on the different classes. Look for the "DIV.out" tag. This is the container in which the text that you type shows up in. The filter property allows you to change the gradient that shows up behind your text after you type. The startcolorStr is the top color of the gradient, and the endColorStr is the bottom color.

That takes care of the background of the box. But you will still have to change the top and bottom padding color of the box. The top is taken care of with DIV.t-o. Change the background-color to the same one that you chose for startColorStr and for DIV.b-o change it to the same one as endColorStr.

Also in the DIV.out class, you can add a "color:" attribute to change the color of the text. With these basic explanations you can figure out what the other classes in the file or for. The classes with an "in" prefix are for designing the text as it is coming from your buddy.

Related Entries