I've gotten several letters about some of the illustrations accompanying various "This Old Workbench" articles I've done. In particular, the blue-gray gradation I use for the background color, and the custom window gadgets I use have drawn questions. So I thought I use this episode as a little how to for these effects.
Why Don't You All Just F-F-F-Fade Away
In order to duplicate the blue-gray gradation effect, you will need an Amiga with AGA, and a program called CopperDemon, available on Aminet, as util/wb/Copper-Demon.lha. This program, by Valenta Ferenc, allows a 16 million color gradation to show on any public screen, (the Copper is one of the Amiga custom chips.)
The trick that I use is to select color 0 as the transparent. See Figure 1 for a screen shot showing Copper Demon with my settings.
Figure 1:My Copper Demon Settings
Urou can hack too!
I use Urouhack, by Tinic Urou, to customize my window gadgets. Urouhack is available on Aminet as util/wb/Urouhack17.lha. The nice thing about Urouhack is it uses IFF brushes for the window gadget imagery. This allows the intrepid user to create his or her own gadgets.
I used Personal Paint to create my gadgets, though Deluxe Paint or other Amiga paint program could be used as well. It's probably easiest to load the included gadgets, and change them as you desire. This way you will have templates to get the sizes right. Each gadget is actually composed of three images; a non-selected window, selected window, and the alternate image displayed when the gadget is clicked on. See Figure 2 for a screenshot showing my close gadgets in Personal Paint.
Figure 2:Customize your Windows Gadget
One little trick I used for the scroller arrow and size gadgets was to make them look fused together, rather than as separate gadgets. To do this, simply eliminate the border on the corresponding edge of the gadget. Figure 3 shows an example window with the seamless gadget imagery used.
