Misc
Under the Misc tab you will find settings for
web browsers, tileframe colors, aliases, and posters.
Web
Browsers
OrbitIRC can load web pages into
your web browser. By default, OrbitIRC will detect your Windows 95 default browser
whenever OrbitIRC is started. As shown below, Internet Explorer is the default
browser on this machine. If you don't want to use the browser that OrbitIRC
has detected, put a dot beside 'use this instead...' and then press the 'Find' button.
Find the browser that you want, and select the .exe file that it uses. These
settings will remain when you shut down OrbitIRC.
TileFrame
Colors
When you tile your chat windows,
you can move your mouse cursor over the chat buttons on the left side of the screen and
you will see a colored frame moving around the screen, showing you which button
corresponds to a tiled window. You can change the color of this frame by clicking on
the color you want below.

Aliases
If you use /commands often, you
may want to create aliases. An alias is a quick way to do /commands, like a macro
simplifies things in a wordprocessor. For example, if you find yourself often typing
/me welcomes newuser to
#ourchannel. Please ask me is you have any questions, okay?
you can make things easier if
you create an alias for it. You can add to the alias list shown below or type in the
chat window
/greeting $1 /me
welcomes $1 to #ourchannel. Please ask me is you have any questions, okay?
now if you type
/greeting bobby
in the chat, it will be as if you typed
/me welcomes bobby to
#ourchannel. Please ask me is you have any questions, okay?
Aliases will save you alot of
typing. If you would rather have this in the chat menu, you can create a menu mod to
do the same kind of thing. The $1,$2,$3,$4,$5 are placeholders for the text.
You can also put in mutiple commands per alias by separating the commands with two
spaces like
/buz /me like the world.
/me is happy.
You can also have a box popup
asking you for input like this
/zub /me is [boxWhat is my Mood?].
if you made an alias like
/hop /me thinks that $1
is a $2
and then typed
/hop bobby psycho
it would be the same as typeing
/me thinks bobby is a
psycho
You can add an alias to the list
by typing it directly in the list, or typing in the alias in the chat. Here's what
the alias list looks like.

Posters
You can create a display a
bitmap image on the left side of the OrbitIRC screen, under the buttons. This is
called a poster. OrbitIRC ships with several posters. To select a poster, make
sure there is no checkmark beside the 'Don't use a Poster' and then click on the poster to
use. The poster files are kept in the /Posters folder where you
installed OrbitIRC. You can click on the 'X' button to update the poster list if you
add files to this folder after you have started up OrbitIRC.

Creating a Poster
A Poster is a Special Bitmap
that sits underneath the buttons on the left side of the screen. You can put your favorite
pic or company logo there and paint or stretch it to fit the button area. It is a very
special bitmap because it contains codes that you put in with a paint program. Just
putting a normal .bmp file there is not going to work properly.
Check this out...this is the the lower part
of the poster 's1.bmp' that comes with OrbitIRC. Start up OrbitIRC and loadup this Poster.
and here's a closup of the lower left hand
corner where the special codes are.

the 7 pixels on the lower left of the .bmp
are used to tell OrbitIRC what colors to use, tranparency info, and whether to paint or
stretch this bitmap. These pixels(and the whole row they are on) are not displayed as part
of the poster. Here's the specs:

Code |
Description |
1 |
This
is the transparent color of the bitmap. Whatever color is in this pixel will be
'see-though' in the poster. In the above example, it is set to lime green. The lime green
that appears in the s1.bmp will then be transparent in the poster. If you don't want any
transparent effects for your poster, make sure you put a color in this pixel that is not
in your picture. |
2 |
This
is the background color of pressed buttons that show that a window is tiled. |
3 |
This
is the background color of a button that is pressed where the windows are not tiled. |
4 |
This
is the text color of a button that is pressed where the windows are not tiled. You uses #4
and #3 together to color an untiled button. |
5 |
This
is the text color of a button that is pressed where the windows are tiled. You uses #5 and
#2 together to color a tiled button. |
6 |
This
is where you tell OrbitIRC to paint(fill the larger space with a smaller bitmap), or to
stretch it to fit the space. If you set this pixel to PURE WHITE, it will paint this
bitmap until the space is filled. If it is anything but PURE WHITE, it will just stretch
the bitmap to fit the space. |
7 |
This
is the basic text color for buttons that havn't been pressed. |
Here's another example. This is the lower
left corner of Parch1.bmp poster that comes with OrbitIRC. It just paints a small bitmap
to fill the space, sets the button and text colors, and turns transparency off.

Here's a closeup. You'll notice that in this
example, the transparent color has been set for a lime green. But since the rest of the
.bmp has no lime green, there is no transparency.

Here's another one. This is orbit1.bmp, and
it streches to fill the space, without transparent areas. Here's the lower left corner.

Here's the closeup.

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