Thunderstripe for Thunderbird

Discuss application theming and theme development.
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Junior Aspirin
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Post by Junior Aspirin »

Thanks to chrisss there is now a cutemenus subskin that works with the german thunderbird. see the first post for details.
Thomas Stache
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Post by Thomas Stache »

I just noticed that the Throbber (aka Activity Indicator) needs some work. The sizes of the animated/active and static/inactive states don't match. I first noticed that having the throbber on the menu bar, as in Firefox. It forces the menu bar to grow and shrink as the GIF and PNG versions are exchanged.
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Junior Aspirin
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Post by Junior Aspirin »

thanks thomas, i had picked it up, just not uploaded it. try the latest version.

in this version the excelent mr mayer has updated some icons, most notibly in the cutemenus subskin.

chrissss can you check to see if the cerman cute menus is still working correctly, a few new icons have been added. notably paragraph, character and symbols.
Thomas Stache
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Post by Thomas Stache »

I just tried it, so thanks for the throbber and the thread icons.

I also tried the cutemenus CSS, but don't you think it's a little heavy on the eyes? Usually Windows apps only show icons for actions that are also on the toolbar. Right now in Thunderstripe there are loads of duplicate icons next to each other, that doesn't exactly help to find the action you're looking for.

Just my 2ct.
Chrissss
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Post by Chrissss »

Works just find, except one small thing. Inside /global/subskin/menuitemsicons/ the file "paragraph.png" is named "parragraph.png" with rr, so that icon won't work with any version right now.
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Junior Aspirin
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Post by Junior Aspirin »

Thomas Stache, i see your point. i have just done it the way all the other cutemenus including themes have been done. you may modify it for your own accord and is very easy to do. simply extract the jar file, go to the .../global/subskin/ folder and edit the menuitems.css. then eather comment out (use /* blah blah */) or remove the menu items you do not want skinned. if i was to include a cutdown version, which menuitems would you like to see with an icon.
to me icons make something easy to find without having to read too much. looking at open office (2b) and the gtk way of doing it, they like you said include only toolbar items or key features, eg undo, copy paste etc. i may look into it.

chriisss i think i have just uploaded a fixed version - i forgot to fix the windows version, linux was fine.
Chrissss
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Post by Chrissss »

Lol, using here the windows version with linux ;) What's the difference?

CU
Toff

PS: We could make two version. One fully loaded and one with only the essentials.
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cmayer
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Post by cmayer »

@Thomas

I would recommend a more carefull use of icons, too.
OK, simply adding an icon for almost every menuitem might be the way all other cutemenu themes have done it but this looks a little crowded to me (and the interface should be kept more plain and simple).

Focusing the icons on key feature could increase the overall quality (and would make the key features e.g. <copy+paste, new, open> easier to access). Most of the applications supporting menu icons (like MS Office, Paint Shop Pro) do it like that (and PSP generally spares icons for submenus, I think this could be a great deal for simplyfication).

@Chrisss

The idea with two different version seems to be quite acceptable, keep in mind if we upload the theme to UMO we should disable the Cutemenu support by standart and offer extended versions or supply the code to activate it within the developer comments.

@ Junior

I really like the idea of supporting Buttons! (even if i don't like the "!" after each entry ;). But those Buttons are really helpful and efficient and would make a bunch of icons for them.

Christoph
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Junior Aspirin
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Post by Junior Aspirin »

@chrissss>
there are two versions as there are very subtle differences. for example if the windows version is installed in the linux tb, the dropdown arrows (view dropdown and options dialogue) do not show correctly and the icons appear randomly unaligned. these are known issues as experence in the original winstrpe theme for tb by scratch and mark carlson. if a linux theme is installed on windows it does look very nasty!
orignaly i began to try and fish out the code that differed between the two and try and make it into a subskin so it would show correctly on linux. the thing is the code differs alot in places and i got bored searching through, and thought it would just be easyer to make 2 versions. you would have thought that being a crossplatform application the themes would be the same - but they are not - and anoying for themers.

on a related note i know there is now a way of making extensions install on a certain os. is this possible for themes, if so how?

@cmayer>
i like the buttons! extension too. the ! is stupid, but i normaly have the text hidden anyway. btw i do not think qute-junk-large.png and qute-junk-small.png are required, they will be taken out in the next upload. aslo i have just reused images that are already in the theme. you can see i did try to hack one together for delete junk, its a bit crude though!


i think the best way of using UMO is to just have the one version, but with no subskins enabled. and as you say just add the way to enable the subskins in the dev comments. ifnot UMO will be full of slight variations of the same theme-remember redcats(or summit)there was loads of them, redcats-green,redcats-dogswithpiesasfaces etc u get the point. also dont forget that scratch and mc will release their theme for 1.5 too.

i will look into the slimmed down cute menus eather tonight or tomorrow and kill those icons!hehe.
chrissss i will need you to test the german version as i am quite hopeless at your language!it is all guess work on my end. also i will try and remove unused bits in the menuitems.css file.
Chrissss
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Post by Chrissss »

Yep, i can do that.

CU
Christoph
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Junior Aspirin
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Post by Junior Aspirin »

just uploaded a very quick slimmed down cutemenus. i think i got a bit caried away with the delete button, but we will see. use the same subskin line. the other is now known as ..../subskin/menuitemsfull.css

oh and sorry chrissss no de version for you yet, will do it after a bit of feed back.
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cmayer
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Post by cmayer »

Hey guys, the Winstripe for Thunderbird released their 1.5b version for Thunderbird beyond 1.0.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 48b065763d

Should we move our icons to the new theme like we did before? (and of course the cutemenus support)
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Junior Aspirin
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Post by Junior Aspirin »

i dont realy know. i thing is their build just patches around the problems, they still have problems - like the transparent new mail popup. i just started again so there shouldnt be any problems. it depends how yu look at it>
have a theme that works correctly, no useless files and can be updated easyly by just taking the apropriate file out of the classic.jar, but is not backwards compatible,
or
have a theme that is backwards compatible, but has alot of unnessecary files and a few problems that havnt been fixed and is hard to route out the code to do so.

using thier version there may be problems with upand coming changes, like the update notifiaction changes.

but there will be problems eatherway. as i am off to uni on sat there will be few major updates for a while - i may get time, but obviosly its not top priority.
the way i see it is leave it as it is, and nag the hell outa me when something is broke! or something needs updating. the themes are slightly diferent anyway so there maybe some breakage which i do not have the time for.

any final feadback on the cut down cutemenus?
Thomas Stache
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Post by Thomas Stache »

Junior Aspirin wrote:any final feadback on the cut down cutemenus?

I like them! Much better than before.
Last edited by Thomas Stache on September 21st, 2005, 12:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
jj44
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Post by jj44 »

I prefer the full ones, but hey, that's why there's an option!
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