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Re: A little theming [message #18818 is a reply to message #18816]

Fri, 24 October 2008 11:01

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unodgs wrote on Thu, 23 October 2008 22:06

Beautiful. I use it in my own applications. I see you styled arrayctrl and multibutton. That's great. The only strange place is for example dropdown button of font height combo on the toolbar. It's too big. But maybe it's not a fault of the theme. Must check this out.
IMO the default button soft border could be blue. I think it would add some "light" to the theme. I hope you will experiment with it Smile

I'm glad you like it!

Yes, I skinned MultiButton. I had to make a huge compromise with it, because MultiButton style and rules are quite complex, and my patience with endless trial & error is limited. But surprisingly, it turned out quite close to the original.

Array control is far from done, it is lacking the smooth shadows that are typical for this theme. But I will get there.

I know about DropChoice being too big. It stands out really bad, but I couldn't figure out a way to make it behave the way I want. Again, a lot of trial & error.

And there is still the huge problem with EditField border. Depending on Linux theme, it adds an extra border. Also under Windows. I've spent about six hours in the last two days trying to figure out the code, and each time I found something that looked like it would be responsible for the extra border, I hit a dead end. For this screen shot I choose a theme that has no such issues. Should I have chosen a different theme, you could have seen the extra border.

I'll work hard to get it to a beta level this weekend.

PS: How's your Oxygen style progressing? With two high quality custom themes, and one reproducing the �modern� Windows look (like in ToolKit Pro), we will have great eye-candy possibilities.

tojocky wrote on Fri, 24 October 2008 08:59

What about to create a visual theme editor mechanism?
I thing that will be greater!

That would be great, but I don't know how it could be possible. When I started doing this theme, I thought that all that working with the images and fiddling to get shadows perfect would be horrible. But instead, that was the easies part. Figuring out how to set thing inn Chameleon so that it looks the same under all platforms was/is the hard part. It would be even harder to incorporate that into a visual editor. But it is something to think about. If you have any ideas, please share.

OTOH, I've been thinking a lot about the previous idea with an achieve with and XML and a bunch of pictures. It would make the theme more editable by the non technical people. Sure, TheIDE's image editor is quite excellent after you get used tot it (but I did manage to crash it once), but you have to write code to apply those images and extra information to a theme and export it as a shareable binary. With and XML, people could edit it easily and use their favorite image editing program. Yet, U++ theming engine is not really targeted by anybody else than us, and I think we can handle a little code Smile

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