LogonStudio is not only a great program to change your Welcome screen with, but it also is a good program to create it with too. If you do not want to waste a few hours manually perfect-ing your Welcome screen and do not desire the flexibility the manual approach offers, then using LogonStudio is the app for you.
Creating a Welcome screen with LogonStudio is very simple. Also, you can easily edit Welcome screens that you downloaded by clicking the Edit button from within LogonStudio when you have selected a screen. However, some of the screens will not be able to be edited because significant changes have been made to Logon Studio recently that make some of the earlier Welcome screens incompatible with the editor.
To create a new Welcome screen from scratch, follow these steps:
1.First, if LogonStudio is not already started, start it up from the Start menu’s All
Programs menu in the WinCustomize folder. Once it is started, click the New button, as shown in Figure 1-14. This will bring up a new window that will ask you for details on the new Welcome screen, such as the name and the author’s information. Fill it out, and then click the Create button.
2.Next, the editor will show up and you will see what looks like the default Windows XP Welcome screen. The best way to get started is to just start playing around with different features. When working in the editor, there are two different ways to select an item to work on. You can just click most items, but if you want to get to an item faster, or an item that you cannot click, use the Elements browser. Using the editor is a lot like
programming in Microsoft’s Visual Basic. When you click an element, you will see a list of properties appear in the Properties browser.
3.For example, let’s assume that you want to change the background color. To do this, you can click the blue background, or you can select the Center Panel from the Elements browser. Once the Center Panel is selected, you will see several properties appear in the Property browser. The ones that you will be interested in working with to change the back-ground color are Firstcolorand Lastcolor. To change the color, just click the color boxes in the Property browser and select a new color, as shown in Figure 1-15.
4.Working with images is also very easy with the editor. If you want to set a photo or an image you made as the background for the Welcome screen, you can just select the [Bitmap] property of the picture properties item from the Center Panel element browser.
Once you select your bitmap and it is displayed, you may want to change how it is dis-played such as if it is a pattern and you want it titled or if you want it stretched across the screen. To do that, just click the Style properties drop-down box and select the style you want.
5.Replacing the images for the different buttons is also very easy. Just use your mouse to select the image that you want to change, and then one property, called [Bitmap], will FIGURE1-14: Using LogonStudio to create a new Welcome screen
appear in the Properties browser. Just click the three dotted icon in the Properties browser. A new dialog box will pop up, giving you the option to edit or browse. If you click Edit, the image will open up in MS Paint for you to edit it. If you already have a new image that you want to use, then just click Browse and select the replacement.
When you are creating graphics for your Welcome screen and want parts of the image to be transparent, such as the background around a button you made, just paint the background with the light pink color (Red: 255, Green: 0, Blue: 255). This is the default color for transparency in Windows.
6.You will not always want some elements in the Welcome screen. For example, you proba-bly won’t want the dividers that appear in the center of the screen and the dividers at the top and bottom sections. These dividers are just images. One easy way to get rid of them is to click the center divider line to bring up the Dividers property browser, then just click the three dotted icons and uncheck the Use Picture box when the dialog box pops up.
FIGURE1-15: LogonStudio Editor showing how to change the color.
7.Editing the text of the Welcome screen is just like editing the text in any word process-ing program. Just click the text, and you will see all of the properties in the Property browser for the font, size, and color. You can even change what the text says by modify-ing the Caption property.
8.The area that displays the users account, known as the User Account element, may take the most time to get it looking the way you want. Dozens of different properties are in this area, one of which specifies the location of the user’s accounts on the Welcome screen. This property is called the Account property. It shows a number that signifies a region on the screen. Click the button to the right of the number and you will get a visual map of the different locations. Select a location by clicking it. Another type of property in this section is the Alpha properties, which has three subproperties. These have to do with how visible the accounts are at different stages. 0 is not visible at all and 255 is completely visible. The Alpha Mouse subproperty is used to adjust the Alpha levels when the mouse is hovering over the name block. Alpha Selected is when the user has clicked the name and Alpha Normal is when the name has not been selected and the mouse is not hovering over it.BackColoris the name of another property in the section as well, which sets the background color for the account. When using this part of the editor, I discovered a small bug in the preview window. For some reason, the preview does not show the back color of the user’s account. Instead, it just displays the blue gradation bitmap from the default Welcome screen. Don’t worry too much about this bug, because it is only in the preview screen and will not affect your Welcome screen when it is in use. Once you change the color, the color change is saved, just not displayed.
9.You now know about all of the different parts of the editor and the basics of how to make a good-looking Welcome screen. Once you are finished, click the Save button (the two disks) and you are finished. If you want to save and view the Welcome screen at the same time, click the Logon menu bar item and select Save and Apply.
You now know the ins and outs of creating your own Welcome screen using LogonStudio. I personally use the method to create and manage my Welcome screens. It is just easier than using the resource hacker and I can live without the added flexibility that the resource hacker provides.
LogonStudio also has a feature that allows you to import hacked system file Welcome screens that you used in the first section on changing the Welcome screen. Although this feature makes it a little easier to convert the Welcome screen to the new format by extracting the images, usu-ally the layout and all of the strings are messed up and require adjustment. If you have a lot of free time, try experimenting with this feature. I have not yet been able to get it to work 100 percent of the time.