My new project: Tact, a simple chat app.

Once upon a time, in the land of application icons...

June 11, 2007

Once upon a time, in the land of application icons, there was a time when the Skype program icon on Windows was colored something else than blue. And that distant time continues to haunt me to this day.

Before becoming its current blue, the icon before that was… green, I think? And even before that, it was red. And that red icon keeps bastardizing me. Go away, red icon! I don’t want you any more. I’m happy with blue. But no, it’s red.

So what gives? I’m seeing the red icon when Skype windows are grouped into one program group in Windows XP taskbar, as is the case when many tasks are open. So the icon looks like this.

app1.png

When you click the group open, it gets even weirder. The group icon is red, but the individual window icons are the proper current blue.

app2.png

And when you have plenty of space on your taskbar so that all the individual icons fir there, of course, the red is nowhere to be seen.

app3.png

I can think of two things causing this, both of which are equally weird. Either there’s some ancient icon resource left in the Skype executable, or (more probably) my dear Windows has made some secret alliance with the red icon and has been caching it for months and YEARS in this computer. The latter is quite probable, as I’ve installed many Skype for Windows builds here since the very very beginning, and quite likely something may have got cached somewhere. But why it’s like this for literally years remains a mystery, and the icon continues to haunt me.