A few points regarding splash screens in general:
Irregular shapes are bad. Alpha-blended borders are worse. My post-RC2 design used both, and we had a lot of trouble with it. While it looked gorgeous under Windows, Linux would not display it properly, and when we wrote a special implementation for Linux, MacOS would not do it...
Although alpha blending looks really cool I must admit it was a stupid idea in the first place.
Irregular shapes with masks allegedly work on most platforms, but not on all. They look a lot worse than alpha-blended ones, but still don't do the job everywhere and don't make up for the associated hassle (hacks to make them work on older Windows systems).
Shapes that can be constructed with CSG regions are better, but the only really acceptable ones are shapes that can be constructed from rectangles. That is because regions are not properly implemented on all platforms, and not all shapes are properly supported on all platforms. On platforms where regions don't work properly, we emulate them with clipping. This is one of the reasons why the current startup screen consists of a block-shape (which also reflects Code::Blocks in its design, again).
The placeholder for the revision number cannot be placed anywhere deliberately, as the revision number is really drawn by the application (not embedded in the image). It has to be in the same location, otherwise we need to modify the application code.
