[catsank]

Can anyone tell why theme previews stink.
Don't put it down to software - It's the themer's who have spent countless hours
building the damn things and then show some half-arsed preview.

Take a look at this:



Apart from the theme making me a little queazy - the preview is excellent
- shows me almost everything I need to know - except the toolbar.

and Max's previews are better than the norm -but I still feel I need more:


This kind of preview is real sad and is the norm -


Nauseous choice of themes eh !

[Adam Betts]

If 1 and 2 could be merged then I think it would look nice and informative.

[TheDisaster]

Swiz and Max have pretty decent previews, but some sites show you basically just the widgets and a scroll bar. I've been working on my theme for a long time, and as it's getting a little closer to being done I've been trying to find out what to use for the previews. Do most themers just make a window in Interface Builder and sites like ResEx just apply the theme and use their own preview?

[mrtew]

I agree! I think theme previews need to show the most important part of a theme.... the Apple Menu, as well as the menus, regular and metal windows, toolbar and sliders. Why doesn't someone create a free app that creates a great standard preview that everyone, including ResExcellence hopefully, can use so people can see and compare themes well?


This thread has a TERRIBLE subject line by the way..... Please don't ever post with such a sloppy, lazy, uninformative, generic title ever again!

[smeger]

I can release a quick'n'dirty preview app if people would like. Tell me what you want in it. Be specific.

[bbxstudio]

Originally posted by catsank:
Can anyone tell why theme previews stink.

It all goes back to the days when of Kaleidoscope1 when all you could do was change the fills and bevels and 'flavor' the OS, so why bother with more than a titlebar a few buttons a scrollbar and some menu elements. Full screen previews are a relatively new thing (click a thumb, it blows up to show a full screen mockup) - but if you're like me, you want to stick the whole kit and kiboodle (sp?) in there and then you've just handed off a full-blown design to the ports and rips guys. You can't win. But yeah, one of the first things I noticed about the OSX theme formats was the dinky previews. I think the size is useful, but what would be the ultimate best is a built-in mini slideshow about the same size previews are now that does a nice little fade between 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or however many cropped stills... something that would require the theme formats themselves and themeswitchers to support. instead of preview.tif you would have preview_1.tif, preview_2.tif, etc. and the switcher would just display each frame for about 2 or 3 seconds and then fade-transition to the next in the sequence and loop back and continue.

[mrtew]

Originally posted by smeger:
I can release a quick'n'dirty preview app if people would like. Tell me what you want in it. Be specific.

Make it like the first one in this thread but add finder toolbar and the metal window somehow! I think that's all it's missing! For some reason tabs are the main thing you see in most previews even though you rarely see them on the actual computer. You could lessen their prominance some.