BuggerIM 2.0 Instant Messenger Icons

Introduction

I created some of these icons ages ago in a half-arsed attempt to create a decent Jabber/XMPP client. Since then, I've found Miranda IM and it's pretty cool. I hated the default icon set, though. That prompted me to create some more icons to complete the set. Right now, Psi is my favorite instant messenger.

The whimsical icons are readily distinguishable and work well on light background and look satisfactory on dark backgrounds. A selection of these icons is packed in the L series. For people who prefer the status icons to have a consistent (but less distinct) appearance, the X series contain the crystal variants instead.

Icon files

If you're using a Linux-like system, you'll need to have suitable privileges to change the permissions of the icon files used by the instant messenger. You'll also need to carefully set the permissions of the icons and their folders to make sure the instant messenger can load them. Hopefully you are comfortable with using sudo, chmod and chown.

The icon sets for each of Psi's themes exist as separate folders under %PROGRAMFILES%\Psi\iconsets\roster (Windows) or /usr/share/psi/iconsets/roster (Linux). Download one or more of the BuggerIM jisp listed below and copy them into this folder.

L-Series

12×12, 16×16, 24×24, 32×32 and 48×48 pixels

X-Series

12×12, 16×16, 24×24, 32×32 and 48×48 pixels

All artwork

BuggerIM_2.0_Psi.zip

Jisp files are really zip files with a different extension. You can fiddle with them to make your own icon sets. See psi-im.org/wiki/Creating_Iconsets.

To activate the icons, open the Options window, goto the Appearance -> Roster Icons -> Default tab and click on any of the pretty entries whose labels begin with BuggerIM. You needn't muck about with the Custom tab.

The icon sets for each of Gajim's themes exist as separate folders under C:\Program Files\Gajim\data\iconsets\ (Windows) or /usr/share/gajim/data/iconsets/ (Linux). Grab one or both of BuggerIM-L.zip and BuggerIM-X.zip and extract their contents into this folder so that new folders BuggerIM-L and BuggerIM-L are created as siblings of the other theme folders such as gota and stellar.

The BuggerIM files can be found on Gajim's wiki under Gajim Community Art:

trac.gajim.org/wiki/iconsetbuggerimversiontwo

To activate the icons, open the Preferences window and select the BuggerIM-L or BuggerIM-X theme.

Miranda IM, through its fancy customisation GUI, lets you replace each one of its icons with one from a "DLL you specify. The DLL file contains icons in the Windows ICO format. The BuggerIM icon set can be found on the Miranda IM add-ons page:

addons.miranda-im.org/details.php?action=viewfile&id=1430

The fat versions of the icons represent each image in five sizes (12×12, 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48) and three pixel formats (VGA 4bpp, 256-colour, 24bpp+alpha) which comes to fifteen images.

If you are confident that Miranda IM will only require 16×16 pixel icons in 256-colour and 24bpp+alpha formats, you may wish to use the MirandaIM versions.

Pidgin's a bit tricky to customise. Instead of just supplying Pidgin with a new icon set, you have to directly replace its icons. The icons the BuggerIM set replaces lie in the animations, status and tray sub-folders of

%PROGRAMFILES%\Pidgin\pixmaps (Windows) or
/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin (Linux).

First, create a backup of this folder or the sub-folders you intend to modify.

Download and extract one or both of these zip files.

BuggerIM2-L-Pidgin.zip
BuggerIM2-X-Pidgin.zip

Copy the animations, status and tray folders of the extracted archives over the top of Pidgin's folders of the same names. You may wish to go in and delete some of the rtl folders if you do not want them to mask the BuggerIM icons while Pidgin is in the right-to-left mode used to render Hebrew and Arabic text, say.

Copyright

All these icons are drawn by me and are placed in the public domain.

—Blancmange