ShapeShifter - it's not just a geek thing...

[yoxi]

I seem to bring up ShapeShifter (the haxie from Unsanity that allows one to theme OSX, changing a lot of the look) from time to time. I thought I'd just say why I use it, and why I'm prepared to put up with the hefty performance hit that has involved in NeoOffice since I installed Tiger and Neo got to 1.2 (not Neo's fault - it's a tiger/java 1.4.xx/SS/slow processor combo thing).

I know a lot of us like to dick around with our interface because we can, it gives us more of a sense of control over our working environment. But in my case, it's mainly because I've got very light-sensitive eyes, and working in an aqua environment is like working in an office brightly lit by cheap fluorescent tubes. It just gets tiring pretty quickly. So I was delighted when ShapeShifter came along. Now I can make changes like this:



The left is Neo/OSX out of the box - the right is OSX with Pulsar theme in SS, plus tweaks in Neo of background colour and text background colour to go with that SS theme (the text b/g colour is work in progress - way too pink!).

What a relief. And when my new iMac arrives next week, I'm going to have to make it a 'mask' so that I don't get all the reflected light off the shiny whiteness of the iMac itself, too. The price of being organic...

- Padmavyuha

(that's transliterated Pali with french translation, for the curious)

[OPENSTEP]

Having the ability to do things like that is incredibly important. I also have friends who get horrible migranes from bright things. After doing a little brief research, I hope the theme changes for buttons and the like will eventually be taken up by Neo proper. The one thing that may be a problem is tabs as I was planning on doing a custom thing since the OS X tabs really just don't work for OOo (multiple row tabs in dialogs, continuous tabs in spreadsheets, etc.

Would you mind doing a little research into two products and see how they behave for you with shapeshifter? Either the tabs in opera:

http://www.opera.com

which uses tabs for custom browsing or P4V (perforce visual client, it's a source code control system):

http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r05.2/bin.macosx102ppc/P4V.dmg

P4V is written using Qt and also is doing "Aqua-ish" tabs and not using segmented controls.

If those don't take well for your needs, let me know so I can consider whether to offer a preference to call through to the Apple interfaces instead of using more realistic tabs that may not be able to be themed.

Accessibility is also something really important to me and a place where OOo and Neo both fail on OS X having no good integration with the standard operating system accessibility interfaces. That'll take longer for me to work on out since it's all custom controls. Cocoa and, to an extent, Carbon bring in accessibility for free...we'll need to explicitly make VCL aware of these interfaces since OOo uses its own custom UI designer.

ed

[yoxi]

This is what multiple tabs, and buttons, look like in my SS theme for comparison:



Opera prefs look like this:



which I could llive with if it were only in prefs, but would be a shame if it were spreadsheet tabs etc. too (though I'm more bothered by the brightness factor than the aesthetic consistency). I couldn't view P4V because you need somewhere to log into before it'll show any window apart from the connection one.

- Padmavyuha

**edit** oh okay, P4V will let me at everything once I leave the connection pane:



At least with p4v it's just the multitab artefacts that are non-themed, so that might give you a clue if you know the difference between the p4v and opera implementations?

[OPENSTEP]

Well, bummer that the tabs are in fact conflicting that much. I guess I'll make the use of tabs vs. segmented controls an option then so NWF can support theming.

I believe P4V, which is Qt Aqua, tends to use Appearance and Carbon for the majority of its controls but noticed tabs were a major exception on 10.3/4. So that's probably why all the controls are looking OK with the exception of tabs. I thought Opera was doing something similar, but since the buttons too are still light grey I guess they may be drawing all of their controls themselves and not using Appearance/Carbon.

Thanks for looking into that for me. It's good to know since I haven't started anything yet with tabs and can keep that in the back of my head.

The other thing that'll probably come up with this is that, at present, the drawing of the text within the NWF controls is being done using the user interface font as configured by OOo/Neo. I don't think the changes to control text color for button labels, checkbox titles, and the like would come through. I'll ponder how to do that after I start getting the bugs worked out of all of the exiting controls.

ed

[yoxi]

[aussie_149]

[OPENSTEP]

That seems really strange that shapeshifter is causing that. Then again, APE and similar tools that try to remap system calls have caused issues in the past.

Here's hoping you can find a way to make it work

ed

[aussie149]