PortableApps (R34 Mod)
Menu Modification Tutorial

Please note (again) that the Mod menus are not officially supported on PortableApps.com or in the PortableApps.com forums. Even so, there are plenty of knowledgeable fans who are willing to help with questions.

For this installment, we will turn out attention to the main folders on the right side of the R34 Mod Menu.

Does anybody ever click on the "Help" button more than once? You expect to get some information or help, and you basically get a dialog box that tells you to go away. That's called "Help"??? I was so disappointed in the LACK of help, that the first thing I wanted to do was to kill off that Help button. Let's see how that works.

Open the theme.ini file and scroll down through the section headings. Two of the section headings seem to apply: [imgHelp] and [sbtnHelp]. Time to experiment! The [imgHelp] section has items such as Height, Width, Left, Top, and Visible. Change the Visible from one to zero, and see what happens. Poof! The Help icon goes away.

The Height and Width in the [imgHelp] section tell the size of the icon. The Left and Top are the coordinates of the top left corner of the icon. By using these four numbers we can pinpoint the icon anywhere on the menu we want, as long as Visible is turned on.

The corresponding [sbtnHelp] section has quite a number of settings. Some we have seen before like font, bold, italic, underline and strikeout. Others we will look at in depth:

• Height=30
• Width=120
• Left=269
• Top=308
• Just like defining the size and beginning point of the icon in [imgHelp], these settings give the size and beginning point of the mouse-over highlight.
• Visible=1
• Yes, can you see the text and highlight or not?
• Margin=33
• This is how far away from the icon the actual text begins.
• ColorR=255
• ColorG=255
• ColorB=255
• These three settings affect the font color of the menu text.

We have seen that it takes two section headings - one for the icon placement and the other for the appearance of the text that accompanies the icon. And where exactly does the text come from? Remember back in Part 1 of this tutorial we talked about changing the Locale file to change the word "Videos" to "Movies" in this portion of the menu? So maybe we could now go back to the Locale file and change "Help" to "No Help" or "Get Lost".

Naaah.... why don't we just change the Visible setting in both [imgHelp] and [sbtnHelp] to zero? That will make them both go away. Here's the result:

That took care of the help button, didn't it? Now we have a nice hole in the menu where that help button used to live. That isn't very pretty, is it? Surely there must be a way to fix this! Why don't we slide the "Search" button up a bit and fill in the hole in the menu?

OK, maybe it is time to identify the section headings for the main folder buttons. Let's scroll through the theme.ini file and make a list.

So by making the [imgHelp] and [sbtnHelp] disappear, we'll leave a hole. We can compensate by going into the the two Search settings and changing the top coordinates to 311 and 308 (that's where the Help used to be). If we eliminate the second divider by setting the Visible=0, we could slide the Search button up to 304 and guessing at 301. It gets a bit more complicated if you hide an icon high on the list, since you have to shuffle each lower icon up. Anyway, here's what it looks like now. My eye says that there's either too much space between Backup and Options or too little space between Options and Search. I'll leave that decision to you. Just shift the Options up a bit, or slide the Search down.

That's it for this section of the tutorial.