Wimp improvements

I would like to propose a bounty scheme for some relatively modest improvements to the Wimp’s look and feel. A suggested list is:

1. Window gadgets: Make slabbed icons (R5, etc.) customisable. The easiest way to do this would be to make the colours (Face, Highlight, Shade, etc.) capable of being altered (e.g. by Wimp_VisualFlags), but it would be even better if the line/fill style were also made flexible.

2. Window/Menu borders: Currently, these can either be off, or restricted to a 3D slabbed style. It would be great if there were more flexibility about how these borders are drawn.

3. Menu separators: Similar to the above. If 3D borders on menus are turned off, the colour and style of menu separators is fixed (dashed, solid black). It would be good if both 3D and non-3D separators were customisable.

4. Icon shading: Shaded icons should blend towards the colour of the window’s textured background sprite, or, if there isn’t one, the window’s background colour. Also, greyed-out icons containing sprites (whether sprite-only or indirected) should visibly shade, rather than being unaffected (as at present).

There are obviously many other desirable changes that might be made (alpha sprites for transparency, non-rectangular windows, etc.), but I believe the above list would be an excellent start, and would build nicely on Fred Graute’s earlier work on the Wimp. These extra changes would make the Wimp properly themeable, allowing more up-to-date Desktops to be created. It would also smooth out a couple of irritating visual glitches.

I would be happy to contribute to this bounty, and would also be happy to do some work (for free!) on related projects, such as an updated Configure plug-in to control the new settings, and an extension of my themes work.

Menu separators: […] (dashed, solid black) […]

I noticed the other day that these have one too many rows of white pixels. This is easily visible (whatever the desktop font, including System) by navigating Filer → Display. This menu includes 2 separators and the bottom edge of the Display menu is 2 pixels lower than the root menu. (The Filer menu has 1 less item and it would be expected that each menu separator be precisely half the depth as a text item in the menu.) I can’t see a good reason for designing this “feature” in.

IMO this kind of visual frippery ;-p is not something that should be built into the Wimp, but hooks made available for other modules to implement.

Well, the only thing standing between this and having the bounty in place is to agree the exact objectives and end point so we can mutually agree with any claimant when they’ve met their goal(s) and can be paid the bounty. Feel free to discuss the details here…