Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Frisbee · Apr 7, 2004, 02:06 PM

Many people have complained about how text can show up as white-on-white in many apps, and there has never seemed to be a real solution. I think being able to simply choose a different theme depending on which app you're in. For instance, I'm using the shinobi theme currently, and I think it'd be great if I could make it use the black text variation in photoshop so I could see the text in the layer palette.

Another idea... be able to specify applications that should use the same colors as aqua's orginals for text.

Whatever... any input or other ideas for unsanity'd be nice... or they could just give more text color options for themers.

NetworkShadow · Apr 7, 2004, 02:13 PM

Wouldn't that use more ram too though? I'm not sure what that would take and how well it would work.

smeger · Apr 7, 2004, 02:38 PM

I've given quite a bit of thought to per-app themes and they'll probably show up at some point. The underlying engine doesn't need much work to support 'em (since I wrote SS with that in mind) - the only big thing is how to implement it nicely within the SS prefpane. I've got an idea there that I'm happy with, though, so as I said, this will probably show up at some point.

NS - per-app themes won't use more RAM, but they will use more HD space.

Text color issues will never be fully fixed since I don't have any good way of telling what sort of background the text is being drawn onto. The current situation is roughly as good as its going to get - I've already done most of the work I intend to do. From now on, I'll just be tweaking what's already there and adding additional bits of customizability. In other words, the text color changes post SS 1.2 will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Don't get me wrong, there will still be improvements to text color issues. What I'm saying here is that most of what I still intend to do is stuff that will give themers more options, not fix the existing unfixable problems. And fix text color bugs, of course - I introduced a few in SS 1.2.

kovacs · Apr 7, 2004, 04:41 PM

I thought about this too, don't know if I will use it but it sounds cool, one other thing I would like to see is a way to disable application skins, some great themes have terrible application skins and for some reason I can't stand safari with non-standard icons, this is the reason I stopped using Digital Device and TiSkin...

Frisbee · Apr 8, 2004, 07:27 PM

The only thing I see wrong in the text colors at this point is how the text on the buttons has to be the same as what shows up right on the window... Which makes it almost impossible to have usable themes with dark buttons and light backgrounds.

smeger · Apr 9, 2004, 01:54 AM

Originally posted by Frisbee:
The only thing I see wrong in the text colors at this point is how the text on the buttons has to be the same as what shows up right on the window... Which makes it almost impossible to have usable themes with dark buttons and light backgrounds.

I'm looking into this one, it's been a big complaint from theme artists.

Patcarla · Apr 9, 2004, 03:00 AM

Oh yeah, that would such a great feature..

AWShuttleworth · Apr 9, 2004, 08:09 AM

Another text colour thing - as far as I can tell, the titlebar text has to be the same colour on aqua and metal windows both. Not a problem for lots of themes, but it's messing up something I'm working on....