Introduction
Today I am going to answer the #1 most common question I receive. I have gotten this questions numerous times via email, in person, and in comments on my weblogs. What is this burning questions on the minds of my fellow SDN members? Well the question is: How do I get those themes/skins for my desktop that I see in your screen shots? That's right, the most common question I receive doesn't have anything to do with BSP or WebServices, or anything else that I feel so passionately about.
Well I'm nothing if not accommodating. Therefore let us embrace our inner Geek and spend a little bit of time tweaking with our windows XP operating system. I tell you what, I will even attempt to tie this subject ever so slightly to the world of SAP by also showing you how to get these themes to work in your windows SAPGui.
Window Blinds
To start off, there is a nice little piece of software called Window Blinds by Stardock. This is the software that I am using to use these themes that people seem so taken with. They also have tools for creating your own themes. There are about 4,000 themes available for this software on the WinCustomize website alone. They range from holiday themed to popular movies. You can even get themes to make Windows XP look like your favorite variety of Linux.
Today to demonstrate what this program can do to your desktop, including the SAPGui, I have my theme set to one of the nice Spiderman ones. It is rather small in the following screen shot, but hopefully you get the picture.
Now onto the promised part of the SAPGui. I spend about 90% of my work day with my desktop covered in SAPGui windows (the other 10% usually has SDN pulled up). Now it wouldn't be much fun to have these cool themes, but not be able to see them in my most used program. The problem with the SAPGui is that it has its own internal themes that override the ones form the OS (or the Window Blinds program). There is a simple solution however. In your windows control panel, there should be an entry call SAP Configuration. If you double click on this, you should have a window that allows you to choose your Design Selection. Unclick the Use New Visual Design option. Now your SAPGui will return to its classic state (don't you just love battleship gray!). However it will also now accept Windows XP themes (at least on recent patch levels of the 640 SAPGui).
For the fun of it, I thought I might try to create a theme of my own. Naturally I choose to create an SDN theme. I copied the color scheme and text colors of the SDN website. I'm hardly an artist, but it wasn't too bad as my first pass at creating a theme. I will leave you with some screen shots of my little SDN theme.
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