Anyone running the Aero Glass theme in Windows Vista has the option of choosing between multiple color schemes: default, graphite, blue, teal, red, orange, pink, or frost. The color scheme you choose, however, does not affect the color of your Taskbar.
I was just looking through a Neowin post from someone who actually did something pretty clever to get around the limitation. If you have Aero enabled in Vista then that means your taskbar is transparent and you can see through it and onto your desktop’s background. So what he decided to do is modify the bottom portion of his background to make the Taskbar appear to be a different color.
As you can see in the screenshot above he chose to do a rainbow gradient on the background so that all of the colors flowed together quite nicely. I don’t think I’ll be doing a rainbow effect like he did, but this is quite a clever “hack” to make the Taskbar any color that you would like it to be.
If you’re looking for a free program that will let you apply similar gradient effects (which make the colors blend nicely together) then you should checkout Paint.NET. It doesn’t cost a thing and with a little bit of work you should be able to get the exact look that you want.
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Tags: Software, Windows, Hacks, Windows Vista
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lol… my thoughts exactly…
It does change my taskbar colour when I change the aero theme colour, but only when I disable the iTunes toolbar thing (right-click menu) and then it goes from black to orange (my chosen colour scheme).
Ahh, iTunes must not be compatible with the transparent taskbar so it sets it to be non-transparent. Maybe once a release of iTunes is officially Vista compatible it will work a little better.
No.
You said: “The color scheme you choose, however, does not affect the color of your Taskbar.”
But, when I change the colour scheme, the colour of my taskbar also changes.
the newest version of itunes works well with Aero (released 2 weeks ago)
hi, yesterday i downloaded adobe photoshop 6.0 and after the download opened it. after opening it my taskbar when back to black, but somehow i mangaged to change it back.
since yesterday it has done it again today, i delted photoshop and for the past hour or so have been tryin to change my colour back to blue. its a horrid colour and need some help a.s.a.p. i dont want to download anything so please give some advice
Sounds like you are maximizing the program. Anytime you maximize a window the taskbar goes to solid black.