Themed Wimp again

Hi all,

After a period of little activity, I’ve resumed interest in developing the Theme Manager software for RISC OS. This has largely consisted of enhancing the bundled themes and devising a simple means for third-party applications to take advantage of the theme system. I’ll be uploading new versions of the files soon, in case anyone’s interested. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of what’s possible at present:

http://www.lym.iconbar.com/temp/screen.png

It would be really great if someone with knowledge of the Wimp could help extend the excellent work Fred Graute has already done to the Wimp module. In particular, the following improvements would be very welcome:

- Button colouring. Present, the ROOL Wimp offers no way to alter the colours used in standard Wimp 3D icons.

- More intelligent greying. It would be better if RO5 blended greyed-out icons into the current window texture, rather than lightening them at present.

If anyone’s interested in this work, I’d be very interested in discussing it. Regrettably, I’m no programmer, so my input would chiefly be in terms of testing, design, documentation, extending the Theme Manager to cope with any changes, and coming up with pretty themes to show them off.

P.S. Fred: if this is the first you’ve heard of it, many apologies. I did email a few days ago privately, but am unsure if you received it. Naturally, further input from you would be very welcome! :-)

Your screenshot looks great. By far the nicest I’ve ever seen RISC OS looking. Do you have similar themed icon sets for other apps like Compo, Artworks and Ovation Pro?

For more intelligent greying, currently RO5 greys them out to white. Recent ROL OS versions grey out to the flat window colour, which looks much better than the old way and would be better than letting an actual texture show though the buttons.

It would be good if RO5 supported sprites with alpha channels too, as it lets icons work on any background colour.

Thanks for the comments :)

I’d be very happy to provide sprites for as many apps if there’s demand. There are currently theme sets for NetSurf (official) and EasiWriter and StrongED (unofficial – I need to finish them off and speak to the app authors before distributing). I’d be happy to add some for Compo, Ov Pro, etc. as long as the authors don’t mind and it’s possible. ArtWorks, from memory, keeps its resources in a slightly non-standard way, but I haven’t looked into this yet.

Greying the icons to the underlying window colour is much better than fading to white. But if the window texture sprite is very different to Wimp Colour 1 (as is increasingly possible), the chance of a clash is increased. This could perhaps be solved by adding a WimpVisualFlag defining the base colour of the window to be used for icon greying.

Alpha channels in RISC OS 5 would be brilliant – it would allow so much more in the way of subtle effects, such as proper drop shadows. I don’t think RISC OS should aim to emulate OS X or Vista, with their OTT shading effects, but a little here and there would go a long way. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of using the Tinct module in RO5 to provide this functionality on the desktop?

If you and Fred do decide to continue your excellent work with the WIMP it would be great if you could add support to allow the user to specify specific sprite(s) for the Iconbar. ie left middle and right

I’ve long felt that having the Iconbar sprite tied to the window background sprites was rather limiting. Anyway, just a suggestion…

Anything you guys come up with will be much appreciated.

Chris and I are still intent on improving RISC OS 5’s themability, and are currently exchanging emails discussing further changes.

It’s going to be a while though before I start working on RO5 again as my main aim ATM is getting a stable version of StrongED out. Once that’s done I plan to some more work on RO5, mostly Wimp, Filer and Pinboard.

Button colouring is probably going to tackled first as I’ve already made a start on that a while back. Currently the colours used are hardcoded but at least I know where to make changes. Now it’s a matter of coming up with an algorithm to find the desired lighter and darker shades.

I’ve long felt that having the Iconbar sprite tied to the window background sprites was rather limiting.

I agree. It would be nice to be able to replace the iconbar texture with something arbitrary. Something to look at in due course.

Chris and I are still intent on improving RISC OS 5’s themability, and are currently exchanging emails discussing further changes.

Really good news. I’m sure I’n not the only one who appreciates your efforts.