Skinning the PortableAppsMenu
From Hak5
PortableApps.com makes a suite of applications that can be easily installed to any removable media. This tutorial will show you how to skin the suite's menu.
Contents |
What you'll need
You can use what ever tools you find comfortable, however using the following will allow you to stay with the tutorial.
Getting the Bitmaps
Before we unleash our inner Picasso, we must first extract the bitmaps from the executable.
UPX decompression
All of the Applications in the PortableApps Suite are compressed using the UPX Executable compression, available from http://upx.sourceforge.net/. So, we must first decompress the executable using the -d option. The executable that we need is PortableApps\PortableAppsMenu\PorableAppsMenu.exe.
C:\Documents and Settings\psycho>cd [Put the location of the UPX installation here]
C:\upx203w>upx -d "[Put the location of the ProtableApps Installation Here]\PortableApps\PortableAppsMenu\PortableAppsMenu.exe"
Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
Copyright (C) 1996,1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006
UPX 2.03w Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser Nov 7th 2006
File size Ratio Format Name
-------------------- ------ ----------- -----------
1276928 <- 287744 22.53% win32/pe PortableAppsMenu.exe
Unpacked 1 file.
Extracting the Hex Data
Now open the PortableAppsMenu.exe in ResHacker. Under RCData -> TRFMMenu -> 0 is the configuration file for the menu. Edit at will. There is also in the configuration file Hex data for the images, to extract it find the magic number (listed below) in the Hex data. Copy, including the magic number, from there to just before the closing '}', and paste it in to Hex Workshop, by going to Edit -> Paste Special... and choosing "CF_TEXT" and the "Interpret as a hexadecimal string" option is checked. Make note where you got each file from you will need later. Save it with the appropriate extension, and you can now edit the images you just created.
Tips
The very large piece of Hex Data (second "chunk") is the main red part of the skin
Magic Numbers
424D
is a Bitmap (.bmp)0000 0100
is a Icon (.ico)
Finshing up
Repacking the Images
Reopen the image in Hex Workshop. Select all of the data and goto Edit -> Copy As -> Hex String. Go back to ResHacker in the place where you extracted the image, you made note of this earlier. Reselect the image and paste, this should replace the old image data with the data from Hex Workshop.
Click "Compile Script" and then save it. PortableAppsMenu.exe should now run with the new skin. You may want to re-compress it with UPX to keep the executable small.