I have been playing with a great new program to skin the Palm T3′s DIA area. SkinT3! is a DIA skin loader and manager that, among other things, allows for 16-bit skins. Among its highlights:

* Skins are loaded instantly. If you have used T3AgendaBG or changed your StatusBarResources.prc file you know that additional actions are needed to load a new skin. Not so with SkinT3!.

* SkinT3! has 16-bit support. Even T3AgendaBG skins were only 8-bit. This resulted in many skins being of lower quality and also making it hard to match a DIA skin with a launcher skin, such as a ZLauncher theme. Not so with SkinT3!.

* DIA skins can be combined. If you like the way a keyboard is layed out on one skin and a status bar on another skin you can combine these two skins together to achieve the desired match.

* The Graffiti application buttons, those buttons that are always white in the DIA area, can now be set to use full color icons. Through the use of a program such as AppIcon, you can basically make these four buttons look like anything you want.

The DIA may look still look strange in some applications. In addition to SkinT3! you may want to use Force16 which comes in the SkinT3! download. This OS5 hack for YAHM forces any selected apps to run in 16-bits mode. This may cause some applications to not function correctly or to look strange but I have found that it works with many applications including AeroPlayer, Iambic Mail, SmartListToGo, TiBr, and Today. One program I would not use this with is Filez. While the application still functions correctly the color scheme gets distorted.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 12th, 2004 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Palm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.