[Tick]

I'm looking at theme park still, and it's all.. overwhelming. Where do most of you guys start at in a theme?

[DaveV1.0]

I always tend to start on the menu bar and menus then the backgroung colors I can't seen to motivate myself unless the backdrop to my theme is the same as whats in my head lol

[Tick]

Originally posted by DaveV1.0:
I always tend to start on the menu bar and menus then the backgroung colors I can't seen to motivate myself unless the backdrop to my theme is the same as whats in my head lol

hehe, ya, as soon as I posted this I started working on the about this mac dialogue. That was fun


Where are the menus in this?

[Tick]

nm, found it.

[Tick]

woo!




Now, should I go with a lighter color on the brushed look? That's the first thing I'm thinking here, but I'm not so sure.

[esXXI]

I tend to start by doing a mock up of a single (regular) window, then doing a matching menubar - so you've got all the "global" parts designed to fit together. But implementing; I start by doing the BG colours, titlebars, titlebar buttons and then the menubar.

Have fun!

[smeger]

Check out Max's theme templates that are included with ThemePark.

[Tick]

Originally posted by smeger:
Check out Max's theme templates that are included with ThemePark.

Those are ok, but still didn't really help me with the feeling of being overwhelmed inside of the app itself.

Maybe if it were more like this I'd have not felt that way


theme:brushed:window:toolbar
theme:brushed:window:main window
theme:aqua:window:toolbar
theme:aqua:window:mainwindow


Or something like that. A lot of these things have names for things which are not what I'd usually call them. If I could get to the parts that would give me the biggest effects the fastest, then it would be a lot nicer. Especially if I was new to the application, that would help a ton I think.

I'm getting around inside of it ok now, but that would have paid off a lot early on.

[smeger]

I agree with your assessment completely.

Most of the "good" stuff is in Themes -> (Your variant) -> Elements -> Global Elements. From there, Window Titlebars, Window Titlebar Buttons, Menubar and Menus, Metal Window, and Push Buttons probably pay off the fastest.

[Tick]

If it were separated by carbon/brushed/cocoa, that'd really help out a lot. The app is pretty good to work with once you figure it out.

I keep wanting to double click the image to send it to photoshop, that might be something to work with too.


Oh, and where do I mess with brushed drawers? I can't seem to find that even with search.

[Tick]

Alright, new problem, *sigh*


I've changed the finder "about this mac" apple and the label there. For the life of me I can't seem to get that to apply. I've also been changing random things to see if global elements need to change that, but alas that's a nogo either. Any thoughts?

[smeger]

ShapeShifter doesn't theme the Finder's about box, because the window is actually owned by a root process (I don't know why). Ditto with About This Macintosh and the boot panel.

ShapeShifter doesn't theme root-owned resources for safety and security.

Also, ThemePark's theme preview functionality is rather minimal. It doesn't integrate with ShapeShifter, which means that it gets none of ShapeShifter's "smarts". The main upshot of this is that changes to text colors won't show up in TP's preview.

So, if you think you've changed something and don't know why TP's preview isn't showing it, you might try exporting a guiKit, loading it into SS and previewing it there - ShapeShifter's preview [em]is[/em] smart.

[Tick]

Then why are these in themepark?

[Phoenix1701]

Not to butt in, but in the interest of answering your questions quickly so you can get on with making an awesome theme for us all, I imagine the reason those resources are in ThemePark is because ThemePark also exports to DLTA, which is designed to be used with theme changers that do theme root-level processes. It might make sense to have these elements separated out into a "DLTA only" section, but that could probably be done fairly easily -- I seem to recall that the logical hierarchical arrangement of elements within the theme is defined in the .theme file itself.

[smeger]

Phoenix pegged that exactly. ThemePark was originally designed to be theme-changer-agnostic, and I've kept that philosophy intact. I plan to ditch that philosophy in future versions, though, since at this point, it accomplishes nothing but confusing people.