Robert Szeleney have applied a new GUI engine on SkyOS, and it now supports themes. Screenshot available (albeit the way the 4 shots were not resized correctly so it doesn’t look right). Additionally, MenuetOS 0.71pre1 was released recently.
SkyOS Implements New Theme Concept
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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From the screenshots it looks like the “themes” only support changing colors and the background image.
What else do need in a theme.
Changing the background and the colors to suit you mood
is nice… changing the image of the buttons is a bit
over the top, as long as the defaults are not hidiously ugly…
take a look at the themes of the PicoGUI project by Micah Dowty, you’ll see what changing the button images can do for you: http://picogui.org/
PicoGUI themes are pretty cool
You can stack multiple themes on top of each other to combine their effects, they are an object oriented database with inheritance, they can redefine any characteristics of any widget.. you can even use them to customize applications rather than the core widget set.
PicoGUI owns us all! Micah, perhaps you should write up a little story about PicoGUI for the OSNews masses.
… and as soon as there is a Mozilla port to PicoGUI or SDL (which works within PGUI), I plan on switching to PicoGUI as my desktop GUI system. Woot!
Heya Rev!
I was thinking about writing an article of some sorts about PicoGUI… it has a lot of features that people don’t expect. I’ll probably do that after the first release of PicoGUI, which is just around the corner. (one textbox widget and some bugfixes away)
Before I use PicoGUI as my desktop GUI I’d want a media player, an X compatibility package, more choices for window management, a complete terminal widget, and 2D acceleration (maybe through DirectFB) but it is a possibility
Uhhhh, I don’t think PicoGUI is good for desktops. For example, they don’t support ovrlaping windows….
Uhhhh, I don’t think PicoGUI is good for desktops. For example, they don’t support ovrlaping windows….
Not yet, at least. One might argue that overlapping windows are a bad thing, since they just waste the user’s time rearranging things onscreen. I’d like to have a form of window management in picogui similar to ion, but more intuitive.
But, of course overlapping windows would be a good feature. PicoGUI’s rendering engine isn’t designed to handle overlapping windows itself, but OpenGL and DirectFB are already good for compositing overlapping windows. I know this doesn’t make for an elegant design like Fresco, but for the moment Fresco still has a long way to go before it’s usable.
I don’t think PicoGUI’s future is as a desktop GUI, at least not without either some kick-ass window management or big changes to the rendering engine. A rootless PicoGUI server for running picogui apps inside another GUI would be great though- on the desktop picogui would act more like a widget set, while providing a complete GUI on embedded systems. This way using Widget Templates (and themes) you could run the same software on the desktop and on embedded systems.
Having overlapping windows would be a good thing to have around, eventually, but they’re not needed for PicoGUI to be useful on the desktop. I know I’m in the minority, but I use ion as my window manager, which also doesn’t allow overlapping windows. It’s a tiled wm.
Before I use PicoGUI as my desktop GUI I’d want a media player, an X compatibility package, more choices for window management, a complete terminal widget, and 2D acceleration (maybe through DirectFB) but it is a possibility
The only thing I need PicoGUI to do is host a) Squeak and b) a good web browser. But then again, I already use Squeak as my desktop. Squeak does the things you’d need PicoGUI to do before you switch to it as a desktop GUI system, except an X11 layer. (see links below) I don’t expect you to use Squeak though, and see it as perfectly understandable to want *native* PicoGUI apps for those tasks. But for myself, I already have everything I need in a combination of Squeak and a good web browser, running Opera and Squeak full-screen is all I do now on Linux/X11, and getting rid of the overhead of X11 and going to PicoGUI would be fine with me.
Hell, while I’m wishing, I may as well wish for a port of Gecko to Squeak, then I could just use Squeak/DirectFB full-screen.
1. Squeak Vt100: http://www-sor.inria.fr/~piumarta/squeak/goodies.html
2. SqueakAMP (mp3 player): http://www.bobjectsinc.com/squeakamp/
and QuickTime for Squeak: http://home.attbi.com/~zurgle/quicktim.htm