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Dragon T · May 16, 2004, 06:28 AM

This sounds silly.... But I'm sure I had my hand on it the other week...
Where is the Titlebar transparency mask found?
I seem to have misplaced it... =/

(of course... I'm referring to when I'm building a theme in ThemePark)

Dragon T · May 16, 2004, 06:39 AM

Ooops... silly me.... found it =) LOL
(musta been using wrong hand)

I had left the background layer as white.... cancelling the transparency =/
sorry for the interuption...
(I was experimenting with a new styled theme... not sure it is workable yet)

Dragon T · May 16, 2004, 06:50 AM

I do have a real question that needs answering... if possible.
has anyone tried punching holes in, or reshaping the titlebar?
(ie. having some parts 100% Transparent.)

I have just been doing some experiments.... and it can be reshaped... and it looks cool in the Preview!
=)
however once the window is selected, most of the transparent section (other than the very corners) turns black.
=(

is there a way around this?

Dragon T · May 16, 2004, 06:54 AM

to be more accurate...
the Cocoa preview shows the black background in the transparent area all the time.
the Carbon preview only shows it in the selected window.

Is this a known limitation that has to be worked with?...
or have I just overlooked something here?

Ozzpot · May 16, 2004, 10:24 AM

Originally posted by Dragon T:
Has anyone tried punching holes in, or reshaping the titlebar?
(ie. having some parts 100% Transparent.)

Three themes spring to mind:

EYLO by Max Rudberg
Latium by Harlan Lewis
Sweet Slumber (6th place MacThemes contest winner - still being made, and I can't remember who's making it).

All of them can be viewed at www.macthemes.net
www.macthemes.net/contest to see Sweet Slumber.

You'd have to ask the themers in question how they went about / are going about implementing transparent areas in their titlebars.

smeger · May 16, 2004, 02:55 PM

Titlebar transparency is something that didn't work in Panther until I hacked it into ShapeShifter. Since ThemePark's previews don't use ShapeShifter, you won't see any transparency effects when you preview with ThemePark - you'll have to export to guiKit and preview with ShapeShifter to test the transparency.

I think that the current status is that you can do whatever you like with titlebar transparency, but that the rest of the window isn't adjustable in this respect. In other words, I don't think you'd have any luck if you tried making, for example, metal window bevels transparent.

I'm not 100% sure about this since it's been a long time since I did the transparency hacking in ShapeShifter.

Dragon T · 07:50 PM

yes, ThemeParks previews appear to me to be showing black in the transparency where Shapeshifter shows the background pattern.
(why doesn't the preview use shapeshifter? wouldn't that involve less maintainence?)

when made into a working guiKit Theme, this is the result:
(ignore the widgets... this is just an experiment)

Basic Finder window, no sidebar, transparency works perfectly! =)

Metal Finder window, with sidebar, the background pattern appears to show through, cancelling transparency completely. This seems odd to me. since a metal window normally has round windows... I will experiment more with this.

metal bevels should be able to deal with 100% transparency.... surely?
metal window mask should do this shouldn't it?

Any help on this would be much appreciated. If I can get my head around this, I can see many exciting possibilities. =)

side note:
The background metal pattern in the preview shows up as greyscale.
While the guiKit version shows up in full colour.

Dragon T · May 16, 2004, 08:39 PM

Coolness !! =))
I have made some progress =)

The Metal window mask doesn't use a black white mask as I had thought....
it uses the transparency imported from Photoshop.. just like all the other images imported.

time to play with those titlebars. =)

Dragon T · May 17, 2004, 02:10 AM

It does appear now... that transparency can be used in the titlebar, where ever wanted.
Although, in the Metal window it can only be in the corners. Not in the centre stretch section of the title bar.

smeger · May 17, 2004, 02:17 AM

ThemePark's theme preview doesn't include any of ShapeShifter's features - partially so that ThemePark isn't dependent upon ShapeShifter and partially because I basically have to write the ShapeShifter theme applying engine into ThemePark in order to make it work.

I plan to resolve this situation at some point, but it's going to be fairly nasty so I've managed to put off doing it so far.

Those are some pretty groovy looking windows!

Dragon T · May 17, 2004, 05:33 AM

Thanks for that.
This is what it looks like at the moment:

I'm not sure if I'll complete this one... can't work out if I like it or not.
the widgets are little switches (not showing in snapshot)
I tried adding little gold thingys on the sides.... just to see if it could be done =)
(if they stayed they would have to be smaller)

This version has big fat square bevels/masks in the Metal window... looks like that'll need plenty of tweaking if I continue with it.

Dragon T · May 17, 2004, 05:38 AM

This 'Brass Paper' Theme also has the occassional black horizontal lines appearing in behind the buttons. (just like the other Theme.) wish I could get rid of them.

Mighty_Mike_T · May 17, 2004, 04:39 PM

This looks like a very cool theme. Please finish it!

Komisar · May 17, 2004, 05:29 PM

I like it alot

Dragon T · May 22, 2004, 11:54 PM

I am still working on this Theme...
tis about 80% done.
=)