[Fellow2000]

Originally posted by olorin15:
Let's look at the most themable OS out there ... Linux. Now there you have GTK themes, you have windowmanager themes, and you have login GDM themes. That's the way it should be done. You can combine GTK and windowmanager themes in a unified wnvironment (e.g. Enlightenment), but this does not apply to GDM logins, since that's not user owned. There SHOULD be a separate app for login screens. Then you can launch that as root and choose a login screen for everyone who might be using your machine (or just yourself). You can't launch for example Gnome Control Center as root and change themes for all your users. That makes no sense!

Also, about complaining ... I've tried a large number of Linux desktop environments out there, I've participated in forums, I've made some Linux themes, and I've never ever seen any complaints such as this! No one ever came along and said to people who code Blackbox or WindowMaker or whatever, "hey folks, your apps suck, cuz they give me an inconsistent GUI - I mean look at my login screen" There people understand their limits. They understand the system. And they do not complain. Here people just want everything to work out of the box perfectly, and do all the things they think the apps should do ... People, be reasonable! OS X IS a UNIX-based OS. So let's follow the UNIX rules. End-user apps should NEVER touch root-owned stuff. If you want an OS that has no logical rules, then get yourself a Windows PC ...

If by complaining you are referring to my original post, if you don't like it, don't read it. It was simply my personal frustrations with it and nothing else. I do expect something to be perfect out of the box if I am paying for it. How would you feel if you went and bought photoshop for 600 dollars and got home only to find out that it causes other apps to crash, has memory leaks and is missing features. I.E. When you save a file, it only saves half of it. They could have released free beta versions to test usability and then after everything was ironed out, released a 1.0 version for pay.

My original intent of this thread was to see if the other people were experiencing the same concerns and hopefully, if they are, Unsanity will do something about it. The voice of many is much stronger than the voice of one. If no one else was, then I definitely wanted to see why these issues were not bothering them and maybe I could 'see the light' if you will. I remain open minded to this app and have a lot of hope for it.

[Lord Sith]

Originally posted by olorin15:
If Lord Sith were indeed above this petty bullshit, he would not be wasting his time writing such petty posts

[olorin15]

Originally posted by Fellow2000:
They could have released free beta versions to test usability and then after everything was ironed out, released a 1.0 version for pay.

Fellow, I understand that when something that works for most people does not work for you, it causes frustration. I'm just saying be reasonable in your complaints. And btw this first version of SS is in a way a free beta - it expires eventually after you've tried it and decided for yourself whether it's something you want or not. SS update is coming out tomorrow, so i think it's quite fair. You say yourself that you see potential in SS - so the 1.0 release did it's job and got you interested. Now get the update and see if it lives up to your expectations. Then you can pay for it or forget it altogether.

[Fellow2000]

Originally posted by olorin15:
Fellow, I understand that when something that works for most people does not work for you, it causes frustration. I'm just saying be reasonable in your complaints. And btw this first version of SS is in a way a free beta - it expires eventually after you've tried it and decided for yourself whether it's something you want or not. SS update is coming out tomorrow, so i think it's quite fair. You say yourself that you see potential in SS - so the 1.0 release did it's job and got you interested. Now get the update and see if it lives up to your expectations. Then you can pay for it or forget it altogether.

Which parts of my complaints did you find unreasonable? The job of a 1.0 release is not to get people interested, it is a release.

Alpha & Teasers - get people interested, gain ideas.

Beta - Testing time, people agree to use the app under the understanding that it is an unstable beta.

Release - This is a stable app. The major bugs should be fixed through testing, and everything should be peachy keen. The only thing left should be future releases with more features added and minor bugfixes.

Let's revisit the Photoshop analogy. So you are saying, that if Adobe released a new version of Photoshop, CS lets say, and they offered a preview version available for download that would last 30 days. After which you could decide to purchase it or delete it. So, you download it, try it out, and then it causes another application on your computer to crash and you loose all your information. That is ok with you?

I'm not asking for a miracle, simply saying I was frustrated that it caused me to loose information. There was a very important phase of this application that was skipped, the testing phase. It's just that simple.

I don't think asking Unsanity to test the app and make sure that it is stable is in any way unreasonable. They labeled it v1.0. I am 100 percent sure that if Unsanity knew all the grief the app caused its users, they would apologize. It is not like they made problems on purpose. No one is claiming that. What we are saying is that when a application is released as final, we expect it to work properly.

Really, I would not have minded any of this if they would have included a small readme that just stated, "warning, themeing on OS X is not safe, this application could cause damage etc......"

This is not meant to pick on your post, just wanted to know how this was unreasonable?

[Groovy]

Originally posted by Fellow2000:

I'm not asking for a miracle, simply saying I was frustrated that it caused me to loose information. There was a very important phase of this application that was skipped, the testing phase. It's just that simple.

No one is claiming that. What we are saying is that when a application is released as final, we expect it to work properly.

I agree. After just 30 minutes of use i pulled it because of completely obvious bugs. Also the GUI was poorly designed. Selecting a theme then hitting preview or apply is all you should need to do. The radio button should be dumped. Furthermore, the aqua theme should have been in the list. it should be pre-viewable like any other theme. It sounds sorta crazy but when you are in one theme it would be nice to preview aqua to make sure you really do want to go back and then the aqua theme should be applied like any other theme even though SS would really just turn itself off behind the scenes. At least the front end would be consistent.


My guess is only about 6 people were testing this and hence the bugs getting through and also these people were too close to the project and why the bad front end design. They were all so used to it they never saw it from a new user point if view.

the above of course is just my opinion

[olorin15]

Originally posted by Fellow2000:
Which parts of my complaints did you find unreasonable? The job of a 1.0 release is not to get people interested, it is a release.
...
This is not meant to pick on your post, just wanted to know how this was unreasonable?

When OS 10.1 came out, did you expect it to be perfect? What about 10.0? I think both needed more than minor bugfixes ... Maybe that's just my opinion, I dunno. I think 1.0 should tell you that they did some testing, they thought it was ok to release, and they did it. They expected to follow up with updates. And 1.0 works for most people. So I think their goals were achieved. Some people buy OS X, install it, and then get Kernel panics cuz something was broken somewhere in their setup. Should Apple apologize for a bad release? Should they have called it a Beta? Maybe Unsanity did not do very extensive testing, but that's your opinion. I don't think people should come out and tell Unsanity that their product is crap cuz it crashed a couple computers out of a few hundred/thousand. If SS broke say 10% of the systems it was installed on, then that would be worthy of a Beta. But as it stands, this is not the case as far as i can tell ...

[olorin15]

Originally posted by Groovy:

the above of course is just my opinion

If everyone added this one tiny little line to their posts on how SS sucks, I would not have a problem with this thread.

I for one tend to like the interface design. And SS works fine for me (have not experienced much memory leaking like others have ...)

[twixster]

My experience has shown that it is safer to change a few pics in the system resources that conform to the system specs then to supress the oringinal theme. For example, we had Kalidescope which was a 3rd party app that when around and supressed the apple theme by a complex series of system hacks. However, we could also do it using Apple theme editor and get better results with out the speed decrease, if you could find the themes. Also, as it must be noted when running Kal you would also notice a speed decrease in some cases. Even thought i used Kal i had always wished that there was an easy way to hack the system and change some system resources or pics so as to not slow down the system, however, as i have notice some of you advicate that it is more dangerous to do it that way, which is why i say to you why don't you just partition your hard drive and install yellowdoglinux or some other linux varient in case of problems, then you can start up in that os and change the problem and restart into our beloved mac os.
Now as in the case of MacOS X, i have noticed that apple both made it easier for us to mod the actual system and hard at the same time. It takes some time to find the right files but once they are found you can mod them and then you can restart your finder for the new theme or you can get theme installer which in my opinion does a very good job at installing themes safely. Also they have nifty programs out that will also save all the files for apperence and allow you to then restore the original files and have a happy system. Also i have noticed no speed decrease when doing themes this way. I have a feeling that if i ever switch to SS i will notice a speed decrease within my system, which i will not tolerate. This is one of the reasons that i do not run Konfabulator. It slows down my system. Also, i would like to know what is wrong with the old way of doing things. I liked to mod my system files to get it to look different and i don't understand why i want a program that chould potentially cause serious problems with my system and slow it down running. Also, i will not pay close to 30 dollars i think it is for a theme modding system that might slow down my system. I like the old free, supposidly dangerous way of themeing. I just with that the themes were being updated faster for that method then the new method. Themeing should be a free hobby.

[quandarry]

well right now it's mainly for the type color problems that shapshifter addresses with dark themes but according to bbx and network shadow it will jump thru hoops soon enough.

otherwise there is no need to use it at this time.

getting my hockey helmet on for shadowman's body check.

ps: it does build up a big meg booty in the cache folder so i don't get the smaller file thing tho.

pps: altho i don't use alluminum alloy i converted it to dlta format from guikit and installed it sucessfully with thmechanger.

[Phanguye]

i really just have two questions... will this update fix screen tearing and the refresh issues with ichat

also will we be given an extra couple days to test out this release to make sure that it fixes these things before we plop down the money

thanks

[smic]

ok i wasnt really blaming SS, it was cool, the one time it was working the preferencepane wanst showing up, it was installed, and i got to use the guiPod (which was really cool)
but something did mess up
i could blame panther, since ive noticed it doesnt copy things right sometimes, like it copies most of a file but not all of it
and the problem isnt my hardware, since nothing else has a problem, and it isnt other "hacks", or software since i just re-installed panther 2 weeks ago

but whatever, seems like a big war on here about it, and i was just saying my problem i had, that happened at the sametime as installing SS and APE

coulda been a coincidence

[Fellow2000]

Originally posted by olorin15:
If everyone added this one tiny little line to their posts on how SS sucks, I would not have a problem with this thread.

I for one tend to like the interface design. And SS works fine for me (have not experienced much memory leaking like others have ...)

olorin - I am sorry if anyone misunderstood me and my original posts. The title of this thread is MY frustrations and everything that I have said here is just my own personal opinion. I am fully aware that many people are having no problems with this application and all and love it. I just wanted to share my personal experience and my frustration. I apologize.

[olorin15]

Originally posted by twixster:
My experience has shown that it is safer to change a few pics in the system resources that conform to the system specs then to supress the oringinal theme ... I like the old free, supposidly dangerous way of themeing. I just with that the themes were being updated faster for that method then the new method. Themeing should be a free hobby.

twixter,
you should read all the other posts that discuss the "safer" aspect of SS. But really the point is that SS may be broken on some machines, and ThemeChanger on others (e.g. mine ) So, if TC works well for you, and you are happy with the way old-school theming works under Panther (which a lot of people are not), then by all means keep doing it the old way. SS opens up new possibilities. To many of us that's worth the money. The old way of themeing was very limited - most themes still resembled aqua a bit. With SS this will not be a problem. If that's not worth $$ to you, fine, don't use SS.

Another point many have brought up against SS is GuiKit format, and how all the best themers are switching to that. I think it's not going to matter, since now they'll start releasing much more original themes (e.g. EYLO), which will not work with TC or Duality anyway ...

[quandarry]

i had aluminum alloy running with shapeshifter...it was pretty sweet, no problemos....
then i decided to try out the new dsky kowloon theme in guikit format and this is what i ended up with.
i logged out...same thing...
restarted same thing...
seems to be a mixture
of the two themes.

[Lefo]

Originally posted by quandarry:
well right now it's mainly for the type color problems that shapshifter addresses with dark themes but according to bbx and network shadow it will jump thru hoops soon enough.

otherwise there is no need to use it at this time.

getting my hockey helmet on for shadowman's body check.

ps: it does build up a big meg booty in the cache folder so i don't get the smaller file thing tho.

pps: altho i don't use alluminum alloy i converted it to dlta format from guikit and installed it sucessfully with thmechanger.

He's not kidding, either. Got a copy, installed just fine. Looks terrific. Now I've got the theme back that I lost when I upgraded to Panther.

Thanks!!!

Lefo