cocoaforge

This topic is a copy of the french topic.
Please do not post replies untill I finish posting the 3 tutorials.

This is intended as a base for people who want to expand it.
I personally suggest people who want to expand it make a new topic, and post their vision of this text in there.

The 3 topics will be
Creating a contactlist.
Creating a soundset.
Creating an iconpack.

PS, I would like to excuse myself in advance for bad spelling, grammar and typos.

First choose the closest possible look in the Adium preferences out of the existing styles.

Then go to the next folder:Macintosh HD>Users>your username>Library>Application Support>Adium 2.0>Contact List. Choose your theme "themename.listTheme" and it's associated color file "themename.listLayout" and copy/paste those files to a folder on your Desktop (or other prefered place). Rename this files by the name of your liststyle.

If you have personalised statusicons, you can add them to your style.
To do this, go to the Applications folder.
Rightclick "Adium" (or ctrl-click) and choose "View package content". Navigate into contents>resources and copypaste the status icons file into your folder.
PS: It's best if you add a howto-file on how to install statusicons. For example: to install the status icons copy the folder to
>applications>adium>contents>resources>status icons

The last step before uploading it to the server is to compress the folder with the styles.
To do this use dropstuff or any other package to make a zipfile. (rightclicking and pressing "make archive" is also good).

------------ end of translation, start of my own comments ------------------
In my opinion there's not enough info about how to alter everything.

In this first step, choose a contactlist style you do not often use and press the button "Customize".
A window will open giving you several choices. Make the changes you wish and press ok.
In a second step, choose a color theme and press the button "Customize".
Again a window will give you several choices to change the looks of your contact list. Make the changes and press ok.

Close the Adium preferences and go back to the Finder.
---here the explanations can continue----

This is the strict minimum you need to know to make an Adium SoundSet.

The easyest is to start from an existing SoundSet. Therefore, go to the Adium Xtras site and download a random SoundSet

Once you have downloaded and unzipped the SoundSet, right click (or click it while holding the ctrl button) the SoundSet file and choose "Show package content".

A new window will open holding the files of every sound and a text file.

This text file containts references between the events ("Contact Signed On", "Contact Signed Off", etc.) and the soundfiles.
Once you understood this, you can start.

To make your SoundSet, you only need to replace the existing sound files by your sound files.
Then make the events correspond with the soundfile.
It's not much harder than this.

Attention : Drag and drop doesn't work. To add a sound into a packacke you need to copy paste the file into the window.

As I said, this is only a strict minimum to make a SoundSet.
In a more elaborate tutorials there will be information about different audio formats, programs that can be used to improve SoundSets and more things that are good to know.

Aside from this, don't forget that your sounds will be heard hundreds of times. So before submitting it please think about using it yourself for a while to see if you really like it.

--------my notes ------------
As I'm not the original author, I have not referenced to the name of the soundset.

For starters, download a random iconpack of the Xtras site.
This tutorial is based on a 7 icon pack. (Off course, you can make more or less icons, but the .plist file will not be ok anymore.)
There will be 3 alert ions, an "away" icon, one "Idle" icon, another "online" icon and a last one: "offline".
You should have created icons of 128x128 pixels in png format.

Show the content of the package by right-clicking it (or pressing ctrl-click).
Remove all files except the "IconPack.plist" file.
Open it with textedit and insert your name at the correct place

(image)


Then copy/paste the new icons in the pack in the place of the old icons (drag and drop will not work) and rename them with following names.

-Alert1
-Alert2
-Alert3
-Away
-Idle
-Offline
-Online
You should get this as a result:

(image)


Close the folder and all that is left to do is to submit it to the Xtras site


-------my notes-----------
I don't feel like making the screen captures right now.
Since I cant upload them on this forum, I don't really feel like making them immediately.
Feel free to do so.

The end could be a bit better:

Make sure you see the icon-preview at a decent size in the window and take a screen picture of your window. (use cmd-j to change the size and the preview of the icons and use the application "Grab" from your utilities to take a picture of the screen)

Close the folder and compress it with your favorite compression tool (right clicking and choosing "Make archive" will do)
Then submit it to the Xtras site.
Use the screen capture you make as a preview picture.

i was actually reading the french forums, glad you posted this here