[fats277]

I want to build a super spare theme with simple widgets. How long does it take to create all the many instances of widgets/colors/etc?

Is there software to simplify this process?

I want to make something barely there so I don't hate the GUI as I work. I'm not into Aqua at all, and I haven't found a theme where I dig the colors and the style. I use Rhapsodized, which is cool, but I want to make something a bit more custom.

I mocked something up:

Here

It's very early, but I based it on this GUI for a web app I built a while ago. We found that the high strung psycho investment bankers who used the web-app lost their sh*t less when using our GUI and these colors:

Here

Lemme know how long this theme may take if y'all want to. Thanks

Fats

PS.. Excuse my other bogus posts, the forum server was screwy when I was posting it. I think it half posted my stuff.

[Dace]

From what I see on your mock up it should take at least 2 hours. If you want to theme the scroll....well good luck, it's very discouraging. A complete theme usually takes 3 days to complete; it all depends on your motivation, organisational skills, working habits and how complicated the theme is.

By the way, you can't make the titlebar or menubar bigger or smaller than 22 pixels. Use Themepark to create a theme.

[fats277]

I want to theme every widget to match.

Is it really hard to them the scroll bars etc?

Excuse the mockup, I didn't measure anything and I figured I had stuff wrong.

Werd.

fats

[Dace]

Originally posted by fats277:
I want to theme every widget to match.

Is it really hard to them the scroll bars etc?

Excuse the mockup, I didn't measure anything and I figured I had stuff wrong.

Werd.

fats

Not hard, just long, tedious and repetitious. Widgets have less resources. Open up an Extras.rsrc in Themepark and explore, only way to learn.

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by Dace:
A complete theme usually takes 3 days to complete;

Do you mean 100% complete theme or just few parts that is commonly to user?

For me, I couldn't finish it any time before one and half weeks. It may take newbies more than 2 weeks to finish.

[bOOzo]

From a complete mockup it takes about a week for me to assemble the complete theme. But it's hard to learn, so for a newbie I think a theme could take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months...

A smaller theme should be alot quicker to make, it's stuff such as scroll, popup buttons and push buttons that takes long to change.

[swiz]

Yeah, if you have never done it before, its likely gonna take you at least two weeks, and thats assuming you can look at all the resources in the extras file and know what they are and where to look for them when you test it. But thats not very likely. I went on the fastest theme rampage of my life a week ago when I lost all of my NeXT progress and redid the Extras.rsrc file from scratch, top to bottom it took 15 hours straight. And I would consider myself VERY fast at the process. I did ChosenOS in three days this week.

I think as a first timer you will get confused with the carbon push and popup buttons, the tabs may be a trouble area, progress bars could be depending on how simple or complex you want them to look and if you have any elements that dont have perfect square edges you may run into alpha masking problems or premultiplication problems. Check this thread regarding that:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=138168

[Toyin]

To make your theme from Aqua would take several weeks (especially your 1st time through). Some of the elements are broken up into so many little pieces that it might take a while to realize what everything means.

Your theme looks a lot like the ChosenOS theme. If you started from that it would take several hours to change the widgets.

note: If you do base it off another theme please get the permission of the originator if you are going to distribute it.