tumbledry

Hacking Around in AIM (Changing Core Colors, Icons)

I finally changed AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to look the way I want it to. Anyone who uses AIM for Windows knows that they are locked into the appearance. The jarring yellow icons and similarly colored highlights are the only option. While one can download add on software (such as AIMutation), there are more elegant and less invasive ways to change the appearance. You see, all I wanted to do was change the awful highlights. My success inspired me to go further and change some icons as well.

First, the highlighting color. This one is the more challenging of the two. First, determine your version of AIM and go to this AIM Codes Page and pick your current version. There, you will see the “HEX offset” of the colors to be changed (I changed the “buddy highlight ” and “mouse-over of buddy info” colors). Furthermore, you will need a basic understanding of six digit color codes. Simply put, you are looking for FFFF00 (bright yellow) to replace the highlight, and a different code for the buddy info color. Anyhow, download this Freeware Hex Editor and then open BuddyUI.ocm and search for the two offsets listed. With a little luck, you’ll find the FFFF00 combination, and you can replace it with whatever color you wish (mine was white: FFFFFF). Do the same with whatever other colors you would like to change.

A little hex editing makes AIM look much less ... bad.

Next step is to change the icons. This was easier, but required more brute force searching. I used Resource Hacker to open AimRes.dll and look through the sub-folder entitled “Bitmaps.” Be sure to use the “expand all” feature in Resource Hacker so you can look through things more quickly. In my version of AIM (5.5.3595), the away message icon was in 200, mobile in 268. I changed both of these. Futhermore, I deleted the games and video icons to clean up my IM window (in the areas of 303 and 324, respectively). The effect of all of this puttering is shown to the right.

I had not seen a beginners guide like this to changing AIM, so hopefully this can serve as a guide to others who wish to tweak their programs. Enjoy!

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