Colony theme for Aston Shell.
 2003 by Taras (SacRat) Briztisky, Mike Bryant

DESCRIPTION:
This theme is a port of Colony suite to Aston Shell. Made with original author's permission.
Actually Colony is not "my kind" of themes, but I wanted to try making a port of such an interesting suite and at the same time preserve the highest usability level of my personal skins and themes.

So, don't wonder if it looks slightly different from what you expected to see. First of all original Colony is too bloated for my 15" monitor and 1024x468 resolution, so I downsampled many graphical elements. Keeping wallpaper in BMP is insane for me, so I converted it to JPG with maximum quality/size ratio. Some things, like cursors were done from the scratch and then stilized to fit original theme. I also spent quite much time on Taskbar and Main menu's button, which was finished with a help of my brother, Artem, a professional artist.

I worked hard to make this theme look as good as possible. As for me, this theme should be a general repetition before releasing long awaited Rusty Machine theme, a result of huge and long work.

TERMS OF USE:
-This Aston Shell theme (theme) was created by Taras Brizitsky aka SacRat, year 2003.
-Original Colony suite was created by Mike Bryant.
-This theme is licenced freeware for home use; no commercial use is allowed without author's explained written permission.
-You can share it with your friends, who don't have internet access, but ONLY in original package (meaning that all the files, including this readme remain intact).
-You cannot use this theme or any part of it in your own works, put it on your webpage/site, BBS, Shareware CD-ROM, magazine or any other media without author's explained written permission.
-This theme cannot be altered without author's explained written permission.

HISTORY:
-13.06.03 Started making a theme. Finished few graphical elements, including main cursor, made some main menu skins. Toolbar skin is excellent. The rest is crap :( Asked guys from A.R.T. for their help. No one answered.
-14.06.03 Everything is redone: cursors are updated and redesigned on pixel-by-pixel basis. Damned Mike's 32 bit cursors are impossible to use. Make my twice smaller... Main menu is redone trice. This way graphics was particially taken from Windows Blinds skin and then edited/downsampled. Start button Finally looks more-less good. After hours of trials... How can Mike make it just an Aqua-like baloon? Still working on Taskbar. Most cursors are done. Too tired to make the rest (damn, working in 8 bits is a way harder, than creating 32 bit cursors ;)
Have troubles with tray clock skin: it's hard to see. Changed toolbars again: old ones were excellent, but these fit the theme.
-15.06.03 Skin for toppanel. New cursors (damn it!), new main menu skin (still need some work), XP clock skin, some other crap :) At least it looks so-so :) The very first public test version is uploaded to DA. Few hours later slightly redesigned XP Clock, and Toppanel. Still working on the third edition of cursors :) Updated Taskbar one more time. This time it looks like Start button. Made new Quicklaunch.
-16.06.03 Colony Preview already got more, than 300 downloads. You're fast, guys :) Now AltDesk skin is ready. Small changes and fixes...
-17.06.03 Nothing completely new... Just few updates to cursors, toolbar headers and stuff. Slightly changed AltDesk skin and made corresponding BeatNik skin.
-18.06.03 Enough!!!

PERMISSION TEXT:
"Hi SacRat,
You have my permission to port Colony to Aston Shell.
Thanks,
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From: SacRat [mailto:sacrat@newmail.ru] 
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 4:58 AM
To: mike@skinplant.com
Subject: Permission
My greets to Mike,
Hi again.
Don't you mind against porting your Colony skin suite to Aston Shell
(http://www.astonshell.com)?
All the needful information about original skin's authors would be
provided."

INFO ABOUT AUTHORS:

Original Colony suite author:
Mike Bryant 
mike@skinplant.com
http://www.skinplant.com

Aston Shell theme creator:
Taras (SacRat) Brizitsky
sacrat@newmail.ru
http://sacrat.deviantart.com


Taras Brizitsky AKA SacRat/A.R.T. (Aston Shell Review Team)