Firebird Theme - a "light-weight" Theme

[aaron]

Thanks for looking at this guys. Frank -- your solution was close to what I wanted to achieve, but Patrick's was exactly what I needed.

I also fixed the icons + text bug today. Oh happy day....

[Frank Lion]

Thanks for looking at this guys.

No problem, aaron. You rushing this stuff? I ask because none of that was exactly advanced coding and you know this stuff as well as we do.

Relax and force the code to obey you.

[patrickjdempsey]

Aaron, one more thing... if you have access to png-capable editor, you might want to fix some of those icons for the drop-down menus... they have some nasty jaggies.

[aaron]

Frank,

I'm really rusty... and I've got a 7 month old son who keeps me very busy, plus a full workload. But I am probably rushing it a bit.

Patrick, I don't see jaggies, but I'll look at them under some magnification to be sure.

[patrickjdempsey]

Aaron... the bad news is the jaggies are visible in both versions of the theme. Every single menuitem icon that is not round has the problem. If you load them into an image editor and create a new layer underneath the main layer and fill it with a dark color you should see it plain as day. For me on Win 2000 and XP, they appear when I scroll the mouse over them and the dark blue background appears. Let me know if you want some help editing all of those... I might know some tricks that would make the process fast and painless.

[aaron]

I went ahead and made some more modifications to my "light-weight" theme (played with Nemesis this time), then optimized all the code as best I could, then used a tool called PngOptimizer (http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php) to compress the images. End result? A fully functional theme file that is only 144KB in size! Check it out here: http://www.spuler.us/temp/nemesis_lite.jar

Other than the quirk of disable/enable an extension, it works great. Anyone have any ideas why we have to disable/enable an extension to get the theme to activate (and a solution)? Please take a look and see if you can find any bugs. I'll do my best to fix any that are found. Then I'm converting all my themes to this format, removing the 'lite' name, bumping the version to 3.6 and then posting them on a.m.o and my site.

Sharebird, would you be willing to set up a "light-weight" Thunderbird theme template? A giant THANK YOU for the Firefox "light-weight" theme template! Can I send you some PayPal $$?

[ShareBird]

Sorry guys for not giving the assistance this deserves... Running into some private issues...

I went ahead and made some more modifications to my "light-weight" theme (played with Nemesis this time), then optimized all the code as best I could, then used a tool called PngOptimizer (http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php) to compress the images. End result? A fully functional theme file that is only 144KB in size! Check it out here: http://www.spuler.us/temp/nemesis_lite.jar

Looking very good! I'm very impressed that this method could apply to themes with this level of customization!

Other than the quirk of disable/enable an extension, it works great. Anyone have any ideas why we have to disable/enable an extension to get the theme to activate (and a solution)? Please take a look and see if you can find any bugs. I'll do my best to fix any that are found. Then I'm converting all my themes to this format, removing the 'lite' name, bumping the version to 3.6 and then posting them on a.m.o and my site.

Yes, this disable/enable extensions to make it work is still a mystery for me... Sometimes isn't necessary at all.
Ahhh.. I didn't find the placesOverlay.css file...

Sharebird, would you be willing to set up a "light-weight" Thunderbird theme template? A giant THANK YOU for the Firefox "light-weight" theme template! Can I send you some PayPal $$?

I guess a similar template for Thunderbird will be not a problem... I have only to manage some time to do it.

Thank you very much, you're welcome.
I'm very happy that this was useful! It's a pleasure for me!

[patrickjdempsey]

ShareBird, it's really pretty awesome! This might be a cool way to do catch-all themes for Seamoney/Firefox/Thunderbird too!

[aaron]

I'm working on converting my Nemesis theme for Thunderbird over to this "light-weight" approach. So far, so good. Same methodology as Firefox. I'll post something next week when it's a little further along.

Still the same issue where an extension has to be disabled/enabled for the theme to activate. Any ideas why that might be?

[ShareBird]

Still the same issue where an extension has to be disabled/enabled for the theme to activate. Any ideas why that might be?

I have no idea why this... It's very annoying. I'll try to ask it at IRC... Or maybe at the Google Groups.

[aaron]

I've made GREAT progress with the Thunderbird "light-weight" theme idea. There's only 3 buttons I need override (mark, compact, tag) and then I should be done. Sharebird, any progress over IRC or Google Groups on the enable/disable oddity?

[aaron]

Patrick, I was able to combine my light-weight Firefox and Thunderbird themes into one file totaling 269kb. I think I might try for SeaMonkey next, depends on how much free time I get.

http://www.spuler.us/temp/nemesis_combi ... ler.us.jar

[patrickjdempsey]

Awesome arron! Seamonkey has many of the icons from Firefox plus most of the icons from Thunderbird plus a huge set for Composer and more for Chatzilla. It's been awhile since I looked into it, but you might be able to combine some together.

[aaron]

I should have all the Composer icons already because all 10 of my themes support SeaMonkey 1.x... not so sure about composer. I'll have to check on that one.

[patrickjdempsey]

I think some of the icons for Chatzilla should already be a part of your Thunderbird theme. I don't use IRC chat, client-side email, or HTML editors, so I gave up trying to make a Seamonkey theme... it just felt like too many unknowns and intangibles for me. That and the sheer volume of icons required... wow!