Removing custom themes

[tperry2x]

I've decided to remove all custom colour themes.
These need fixing at the engine level, rather than trying to patch them ad-hoc.
This is because I'm not happy with how they look. They are inconsistent across different versions of MacOS and Windows.
If you also want to remove all custom colour theming, please use the changes attached.

As Paul McClernan says here:
https://github.com/OpenXTalk-org/OpenXt ... .1-OXT-RC4

The faux 'darkMode' that was added should no longer be the default on Windows. Windows 10 window frames and menus still display as 'lightMode' and the combination just didn't look very good ... Several IDE palettes that were assigned slight transparency for a more 'modern' look similar to recent versions of macOS, have been reverted to opaque due to strange behaviors for transparent windows on Win10.

I'll also add that these changes in OXT Lite remove all custom Mac-type dark mode theming. The only OS that handles this correctly is currently Linux, so I will no longer attempt to patch / bodge it for MacOS and Windows.

theme-removal.7z

(152.83 KiB) Downloaded 248 times

[richmond62]

Well, well, well, as several of my ancestors on the Isle of Bute were soutars (shoemakers) who made bespoke shoen, and I remember watching a chair bodger at work many lang year syne, I am 'into' customisation, and intend to pursue this to some sort of satisfactory conclusion.
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Well worth 15 minutes:

https://www.chilternphoto.org.uk/index/category/99

[FourthWorld]

I've decided to remove all custom colour themes.
These need fixing at the engine level, rather than trying to patch them ad-hoc.
This is because I'm not happy with how they look. They are inconsistent across different versions of MacOS and Windows.
If you also want to remove all custom colour theming, please use the changes attached.

I'll add my vote of confidence to that.

The mismatch with engine-rendered controls is what I'd alluded to in an earlier post. For this to be done well it needs to be in the engine's role of obtaining rendering from the OS and then compositing for display in the window's content region.

[richmond62]

For this to be done well it needs to be in the engine's role of obtaining rendering from the OS and then compositing for display in the window's content region.

Oh, absolutely, BUT, until someone comes along who is prepared to:

1. Fossick around in the engine code.

2. Bake new versions of the engine for all the development platforms.

We're a bit stuck with that one.

I envisage a plugin stack where programmers can set up what they want their templates to look like so that when they drag them off the Tools stack they conform to what that users wants and save the programmer a lot of time 'tuning' each control to get the 'look and feel' (and I am deliberately using that turn of phrase) that they desire.

[tperry2x]

I've been thinking about this today, while endlessly resetting student passwords for them.
I wonder about having a PNG button library stack, so you can drop in pngs of every operating system you might want. A copy & paste scenario. Nice and simple, and ensures the right control and button drawn for whatever system is being run.

The other nice thing about this. If you were a developer on Windows, but didn't have access to a Sonoma Mac (but you were creating an app for macos) you can then drop in the right button and get an idea of how how it'll actually look.

[richmond62]

Nope: PNG buttons are not scaleable, and how would you set their names (and labels)?

Somewhere 'deep' in the murky regions of the engine (possibly encoded in C++) there is the guff for 'look and feel' (pace Luck & Flaw: Spitting Image before its cheapened second incarnation), and either:

1. That has to be attacked, unfolded, and generally reimagined.

2. That has to be 'externalised' into the somewhat less murky files in the 'Toolset' folder.

3. That has to be over-ridden by something somewhere in the 'Toolset' folder, or on a Boot-by-boot basis with a plugin.

Now, as the right pain-in-the-bum that I am, I am going to attempt #3 (Yes, I learnt how to use the 'pound sign' for 'number' during my time at SIUC, pace Richard Roundtree). At least it should prove the least intrusive of the 3 possibilities and, as I wouldn't know some C++ from a Slovakian shopping list, that is all I can do at present.

As we are now living in an open source, 'anything' goes cosmos, there is very little point indeed in getting dogmatic about this sort of thing.

Personally I have always felt lumpy about LC's buttons and their way of being slithery shits, insofar as they tend to cause problems when deployed on different platforms with fonts resulting in words getting cut off and so on. So all my standalones [100 and counting] have used images as buttons.

So, my main excuse for attempting a plugin is just to try to show that theming can be done from within the IDE without recourse to rejigging any engines.

[richmond62]

Dropping in buttons to see how they would look.

Not on my watch.

Set up your button to look the way you like it and the import a snapshot of that button, delete the button and use the image.

SNAG: extremely time-consuming.

[richmond62]

endlessly resetting student passwords for them.

Cripes, talk about 'wanker's cramp'.

What I cannot work out is, that is you work at a University, why students have 'mocks', and why, if you work at a School, you refer to the pupils as 'students': after all, you do work in England, not in the United States where even babies in Day Care Centers are referred to as 'students'.

Anyway, wherever you work, in my experience from many long years ago in Britain, each pupil/student has a unique number (I remember that mine, at high school, was 74103), so why not use that as the password and be done with resetting altogether?

[FourthWorld]

I wonder about having a PNG button library stack, so you can drop in pngs of every operating system you might want. A copy & paste scenario. Nice and simple, and ensures the right control and button drawn for whatever system is being run.

OS UIs are a moving target. MetaCard started with a hardwired approach to rendering emulated UIs, and while it was MUCH faster than interleaving the compositing with OS rendering hooks, it was expensive to try to keep up with the changes.

That's when the "Appearance Manger" option for the lookAndFeel global property was added, first for MacOS and eventually for all desktop platforms.

Even within an OS version, user-settable options should be reflected. On Mac this is mostly the highlight color, but in Win and Linux these options are vast.

The answer is C++ engineering. At some point it's unavoidable, and this seems to be that point.

[tperry2x]

What I cannot work out is, that is you work at a University...

I don't. It's a secondary school.

why students have 'mocks'...

This is mandated by the DfE, who ultimately fund and regulate the trust-owned schools.

and why, if you work at a School, you refer to the pupils as 'students': after all, you do work in England, not in the United States where even babies in Day Care Centers are referred to as 'students'.

Because you see with your pupils, students study.

Anyway, wherever you work, in my experience from many long years ago in Britain, each pupil/student has a unique number (I remember that mine, at high school, was 74103), so why not use that as the password and be done with resetting altogether?

Because student data is fed from our MIS. (One place for all all data). It then syncs to Active Directory, which uses email addresses, as all students have an individual (locked down) email address. One password for everything through SSO (Single-Sign-on, and mostly Seamless-sign-on - meaning once they sign in, they are signed in to everything). However it still requires the student to remember their password. If they can't remember their password, they would never remember their student number. This is also held in the MIS, however the potential for one student to guess another's student ID and log in as them is very possible. This then means they are signed in as the wrong user, which has further considerations for the safeguarding software and so it goes on).

[tperry2x]

Nope: PNG buttons are not scaleable, and how would you set their names (and labels)?

Granted, they aren't scaleable. You could have a blank button as part of a group, then simply a text field on top of that, but represented as a single draggable group.
The good bit about that, you can change the underlying png image in script, based on the systemversion. You can change the button text seperately via script of course, to match every possible combination. Just needs a bunch of switch / case, or if / else statements.
What I had in mind is a stack where you can choose whatever you want, for whichever platform a developer wants to target. There could even be button groups that modify 'themselves', by detecting the systemversion and the platform. - which reminds me, systemversion is another thing that is broken on MacOS ('Big Sur' and upwards), although Paul does have a shell / terminal command to deal with this. I've not yet located that though in github or by taking apart the RC builds.

...all my standalones [100 and counting] have used images as buttons.

Hang on, so... surely these aren't scaleable either?

[richmond62]

No, they are not.

Bit I am not dragging them off a Tools palette to be used all and everywhere: each faux button is a one-off gor a specific context.

[tperry2x]

Hi Richmond.
Can you just see if I'm barking up the wrong tree here. If this approach works, then I'll go and create UI elements for all OS controls. It'll take a while though, but I'm essentially externalising what should have been done in the engine all along.

I know OXT requires MacOS 10.9 and higher, but just in case someone is building a 32bit MacOS X app for 10.6, I'll go back as far as Snow Leopard.

Edit: not 100% happy with it, after digging an old Mac out for comparison. More work required.

[richmond62]

Tomorrow morning, I hope.

Currently wrestling with 6 year olds, hexagons, pentagons and primary colours.

[richmond62]

Erm . . . here I am all raring to go, and the thing (which had me salivating with anticipation - mainly because I am 'into' the old Apple Aqua interface in a big way) seems to have gone down the oubliette.

https://youtu.be/NGYaYFv89MM

What gives?

[tperry2x]

Erm . . . here I am all raring to go, and the thing (which had me salivating with anticipation - mainly because I am 'into' the old Apple Aqua interface in a big way) seems to have gone down the oubliette.
What gives?

Me. Unfortunately. I give https://youtu.be/RwBUnabkHxA?feature=shared&t=37

Edit: not 100% happy with it, after digging an old Mac out for comparison. More work required.

I still haven't finished it. Far from it. It's just a proof of concept thing at the moment.
And it really doesn't look like much, but because I'm trying to replicate what should have been done in C++ in the first place, this is what I have so far:
[attachment removed]

[richmond62]

Um, Yes: not half as sexy as that image you posted yesterday, and then deleted:
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[tperry2x]

Um, Yes: not half as sexy as that image you posted yesterday, and then deleted

Yes, that was just a screenshot of how I see it being laid out eventually. (sorry to get your hopes up, but I'm not at that stage yet!)

The point being though, that you should be able to duplicate that popup control as many times as you like and it'll still function. You can put one over the top of the other, and the popup menu won't be hidden.
You can resize it horizontally and it'll scale without the corners being distorted.
And it *should* look closer to MacOS X 10.6 - as I say, I'll just have to work through making all other interface elements.

The menus don't actually function as menus, as I'm yet to script that. But the idea is that you just change the properties on the group to interact with it, and no scripting should really be needed by the end user (although you can if you want to of course).

[richmond62]

Yes, that was just a screenshot of how I see it being laid out eventually.

You could "be a darling" and either repost your mockup [it does not need to be hidden; just as long as we all know it is an idea, nothing concrete], or send it to me in a private message.

Here are some funky toys for any one who wants them:

[tperry2x]

You could "be a darling" and either repost your mockup [it does not need to be hidden; just as long as we all know it is an idea, nothing concrete], or send it to me in a private message.

Just an idea, actually just a screenshot of interfacebuilder via a google search

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