Big-O Software

I made myself an active desktop to change my desktop image every so often, the only thing is, the active desktop only works if there's an icon on the desktop. I put an icon on the desktop, and it isnt transparent...the icon text has a background, which totally screws up my image. Is there anyway around this?

how do you make an active desktop?
is it like a gif or something?

I believe (but could be wrong)...you're looking for alpha-transparency. But Windows doesn't support it, Sadly.

windows xp (i think 2k and others but doubt) DOES support alpha channels on icons.

but when active desktop is enabled, xp disabled alpha channels on images/icons on the desktop. its how it works. no way around it

actually, this doesnt really have anything to do with the active desktop part at all.

Windows has always put a square border around the text of an icon..... it is set to the desktop background color. So if you have an image set as your background, your icon texts are gonna stand out.

There are 3rd party applications that will actually set something to the font or something that makes the block disapere. But in my opinion it looks even worse, cause the colors of the background usually clash with the text and stuff.

but hey.... o well.



I dont really know the names of anything that will do this for ya though. You can TRY tweak-ui but im not really sure.

Plasma2002b wrote:actually, this doesnt really have anything to do with the active desktop part at all.

Yes it does. When I don't have the active desktop enabled, there is no box around the text of my icons. There is a shadow to the text, but no color-box.

rokbass wrote:how do you make an active desktop?
is it like a gif or something?

You can actually make your normal desktop to be a .gif, you don't need to enable active desktop. I'm a little sketchy on the details, but from what I do know, its an html page.

yea, as u can c, xp did away w/ that annoying crap.

sw³³n³y wrote:

Plasma2002b wrote:actually, this doesnt really have anything to do with the active desktop part at all.

Yes it does. When I don't have the active desktop enabled, there is no box around the text of my icons. There is a shadow to the text, but no color-box.

Right. XP's text label backgrounds are transparent, so long as active desktop is not enabled; but when it is, the text label backgrounds become non-transparent.

Michael wrote: Right. XP's text label backgrounds are transparent, so long as active desktop is not enabled; but when it is, the text label backgrounds become non-transparent.

So how do I make it transparent despite the active desktop? Or, is there no way..

well when worst comes to worst, what i do is just take off my right shoe and throw it at the tower.


It sometimes makes a noise, sometimes it doesnt.... but the end results always seem to be different.


Sometimes things work out.






You should try it

sw³³n³y wrote:So how do I make it transparent despite the active desktop? Or, is there no way..

As far as I know, there is no way.