I just managed to create fully functional aVist skin but this time with transparency (translucent effect inside avast! settings would have to be enabled to see that effect, and it would work only on newer OSes like Windows 2000/XP and Vista).
However, there are some issues with TGAs being used inside skins, particularly with those buttons on the top of the transparent parts of the skin. So whenever you create a button with transparent surrounding areas, it would show those transparent parts over already transparent background of the skin. I am not sure if you people will understand this, but whoever tried to create skins for avast! knows what I'm talking about. Also, there is no way you can create a button in other shape than square and that gives even more problems (see all those rounded corners buttons ?
)
So, my conclusion was... if skin can't look and behave 100% without those small pixel glitches (I am even sure most of you would never ever notice those little tiny pixel issues), I am not going to publish it. In a matter of fact, I already completely erased it and even if I decide to publish it one day, I would have to do it all over again for which I relly don't have enough time. This is the only proof that transparent aVist skin really existed
My file manager (spot the size of the skin and compare it to the size of the "normal" aVist skin above the transparent one... not a single byte added. I even managed to keep the same size even though I used TGA with alpha channeling):
This is how it looked on my desktop (of course I don't have those ugly tulips on my desk, just picked that wallpaper to better show transparency inside the skin):