Aim 7 Beta: Change Screen Name Color

This method only works in Beta 3 version of Aim 7
Aim 7.1 users read here

So you’ve been enjoying AIM 5.9′s incredibly familiar red and blue screen name colors. AIM 7 replaces the screen name color scheme yet again with a pretty natural green and a horrendous brown color.

Fear not, you can change these screen name colors to any color you wish to use.

You will do this by editing one extremely long file with notepad. So let’s get started!

Preparing your files

The first step is to find the file that controls screen name colors.

This folder is located at

C:\program files\aim7\services\imApp\ver7###\resources\en-US

Simply copying and pasting the above path will not work in Windows Explorer. You must manually navigate to the folder using My Computer if you have Windows XP or Computer in Windows Vista.

Ver7### represents your Aim 7 version number which you will instantly see if you navigated to the folder manually.

en-US is the language and region folder. Obviously if you are using the Spanish language of AIM7, the folder’s name would change to sp-US, or french would be fr-FR. This last folder will be instantly obvious if you manually navigated to the folder.

As you reach that folder open notepad. You will drag the file strings.xml into notepad.

Strings.xml controls a lot of stuff. It’s imperative that you do not try to edit anything else in this file unless you know what you are doing. You might want to expand notepad’s window a bit so you can see what you are doing.

Changing Your Screen Name Color

Search for the line below.

<string name="imForm.history.header.local.color">#864F04</string>

Note the HTML color code is highlighted in brown. Use the HTML Color Code site to insert a color of your into this area. After you are done you can save the file and RESTART AIM.

Changing Other Screen Name Colors

Similar to Aim 6, you can edit the colors of other screen names. Remote.color is located a tad below the local.color so it should be easy to find. Remote.color.0 represents the person who IMs you. Any number higher than 0 represents chatroom screen name colors.

    <string name="imForm.history.header.remote.color.0">#0172F3</string>
    <string name="imForm.history.header.remote.color.1">#0052a3</string>
    <string name="imForm.history.header.remote.color.2">#0860A8</string>
    <string name="imForm.history.header.remote.color.3">#F91361</string>
    <string name="imForm.history.header.remote.color.4">#0197B5</string>

The colors of the first 5 screen names in a chatroom are already highlighted for you. You can change any of them by typing any HTML color code you want. After you are done save the file and RESTART AIM.