Aluminium Kai 2.

Discuss application theming and theme development.
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Mudfoot
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Mudfoot »

Aaaah.., bless you Frank! What a relief! I've been making do with AnyColor since updating and it's great fun but you really can't beat a full blown theme like AK2! Good to see the iCe's are back in business too.

On behalf of the entire AK2 Appreciation Society I'd like to convey a rather big 'Thank You Very Much For Sticking With It Mr.Lion!' to you.

Now go off and enjoy some well-deserved rest and recuperation. Tend to the garden, sniff some flowers and treat yourself to a double helping of pie, popsicles and ale (albeit stale but still good ale).

And then, when you're all rested up and you feel good and ready and up for it, I'll start nagging you about AK-ifying a couple of essential extension buttons that seem to have somehow escaped your attention.. :wink:

:D


PS - That song is bloody awful.., sentimental crap! :wink:
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

Mudfoot wrote:Aaaah.., bless you Frank! What a relief!

As always, it is my pleasure. :)

Well, I say 'my pleasure', it would be if the damn updates were in the winter..oh, blissful joy. But, as most know, I do prefer to be outside in the summer and, er, the spring.....and the autumn, now I come to think of it. Even so, even in July, the very height of the gardening season .......it is still a pleasure and you are most welcome.

Must say, I do like having my own website, been answering Gmails all this evening from users about the updates. Perhaps it's because they have to make the effort to go to my website at all...anyway, they are all a very nice bunch. Don't get me wrong, 95% of users at Addons were fine, but there were also those who were not.

Yes, that song was rubbish. I thought I'd do a hhh and lead people to think I was leaving or something...only to immediately return. I see that I didn't fool you. :P

Yep, give me a few days (I having a log cabin built at the end of the garden - leaded windows, very Elizabethan looking) and you can fire all the AK2 stuff that you like at me and I'll be happy to fix the lot.

Frank :)
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

Aluminium Kai 2

Version 3.5.2 Compatibility : Firefox: 3.0b5 - 3.7.*


Image

http://franklion.co.uk/AK2-N/ak2.html





Image


The toolbar buttons now have a new friend -

Image


...and here he is, Mr Fullscreen button -

Image


I do grant you that just putting the letter 'F' on a button to represent 'Fullscreen' is probably not the most creative of artistic decisions that I have ever made, but nevermind. :)



Changelog -

Version 3.5.2 —1st of January, 2010 — 1,301 KB


1. New version recoded for Firefox 3.6 and 3.7. It is also backwards compatible with Firefox versions 3.0 and 3.5.
2. New fullscreen button for 3.6+
3. RSS feed fix.
4. Many fixes to improve compatibility with the Linux Operating System
5. Plugin icon fix in Addons Manager.
6. Many visual improvement fixes, especially on text colours.
7. Recoding fixes to improve flexibility with different font sizes for visually impaired users.


As usual, all support question, feature requests, etc to the 'Contact Us' link here, please.


Frank :)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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Mudfoot
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Mudfoot »

Frank Lion wrote:The toolbar buttons now have a new friend -

Image


...and here he is, Mr Fullscreen button -

Image


I do grant you that just putting the letter 'F' on a button to represent 'Fullscreen' is probably not the most creative of artistic decisions that I have ever made, but nevermind. :)

Frank :)

I guess we'll be calling that the 'Frank-button' from now on.

Thanx a bunch Mr.Lion! Keep up the Kai-work!

:D
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

Mudfoot wrote:Thanx a bunch Mr.Lion! Keep up the Kai-work!

:D

My pleasure, Mud. :)

Just a reminder - there are a few 'theme options' hidden away in my themes. So, for example, if you select a blank homepage or when you open a blank tab then instead of a stark white page staring at you, you would prefer the loading screen page of AK2 instead, like this -


Image


Then copy and paste the following line, anywhere into your userContent.css, save and restart Firefox -

Code: Select all

@import url("chrome://global/skin/theme-options/aboutblank1.css");



Finally, on a personal note. A while back I wrote this here -

Frank Lion wrote:Must say, I do like having my own website, been answering Gmails all this evening from users about the updates. Perhaps it's because they have to make the effort to go to my website at all...anyway, they are all a very nice bunch. Don't get me wrong, 95% of users at Addons were fine, but there were also those who were not.

I would just like to add to that, my surprise and sincere thanks for the very generous 'Christmas' donations from a number of you.

I shall endeavour to spend it all wisely. :)

Frank :)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

Very Minor Update

...corrected a tiny appearance bug on the Addons Manager. Only I, I reckon, would spot it and it wasn't worth a new version update. Just install AK2 again from http://franklion.co.uk/AK2-N/ak2.html

Frank :)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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Mudfoot
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Mudfoot »

:-k ... Aah..., the icon mouse-over thingy! You're right, I hadn't even noticed. :wink:

Thanks Frank!

:D
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by jimfitter »

As always, your attention to detail is much appreciated. I guess the fact that you're always on the upkeep is why; there are so few pages on your threads, despite all your themes being very successful when you were on the Addons site. Not a lot of complaints about bugs. ;)
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

...I'll cut quickly to the chase - AK2 is returning...for SeaMonkey and T/Bird * users.

As most of you know, come version 57, Firefox is ditching Complete Themes and XUL based extensions and doing only feeble content (webpage) WebExtensions.

So, that's bad news, right? Well, it depends how you look at it.

Since, November 2015, I've known that Complete Themes on Firefox were being whacked, but didn't know when...but, now I do. As my current 'stable' of themes = 6, i.e. 2 for SM and T/Bird, plus 4 for Firefox, this meant that it would be unwise to do any new ones. This is because however much you simplify the maintenance process, and I have improved that side tremendously compared with other themes, they still take time, still have to be updated, maintained and user questions/requests, etc still need to be done. That's why I've purposely maxed my stable to 6 (which is probably far more than anyone else anyway)

However, with Firefox whacking themes in 57....you see where this is going?

In celebration of being able to drop 4 Firefox themes, AK2 is coming back home to, er, SeaMonkey. And yeah, it will be a tough conversion job, but it ain't like I've never done this stuff before, is it? :)

:P



Image



* T/bird users will only get AK2 backgrounds to start with, mainly because I'll have to do a whole load of toolbar buttons for those, which will be in the same 'glowing ball' style as when you hover over buttons in the browser version of AK2.
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mightyglydd
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by mightyglydd »

Great news, nice one mate !
And next... 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300, 300... man I miss that Theme... and old Mud and Jim.
You are a... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH1CMCtV4to :)
Last edited by mightyglydd on April 1st, 2017, 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
#KeepFightingMichael and Alex.
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jimfitter
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by jimfitter »

Looking forward to it. This ain't a April Fools post, right? :-P
Inside every old man is a young man wondering what the hell happened. - Terry Pratchett
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mightyglydd
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by mightyglydd »

Hah! :)
#KeepFightingMichael and Alex.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

Cheers, Mighty. :)
jimfitter wrote:Looking forward to it. This ain't a April Fools post, right? :-P
Nope, over here it's back luck to do an April Fool after 12 midday.

Mud must be stoned or off riding his tricycle or something, I reckon. :P

****

I did the proof of concept ages back of how to convert the old style 3 - 4 row toolbar.png into my new style themes in ML Future Modern - http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p13907129

AK2 though would be the hardest to convert, as everything, everywhere is different in that theme. We'll see how it goes, but yeah, BMV and 300 are not out of the question.

Incidentally, looking through my stuff I found a mother of a theme that I had 80% finished - Metal Lion Necromancer ! Totally new toolbar button shape and style and the whole theme goes back to the days of 'excess' :)

As a sneak preview, here's the background of just the menus! -


Image
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Frank Lion
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by Frank Lion »

Don't expect too many (any?) progressive updates on this, but here's the start.

As always, I start with the template theme (in this case, ML Future Modern) and, er, convert into something else. AK2 does present a bit of a challenge, as unlike all my other themes, the toolbar buttons are spread across 3 pngs instead of all being on just one.

After deciding if to move them all to one png and redo all the -moz-image-regions or not (highly complex), I decided against and took a different route, which will be fine but still tricky. Like my other SM themes, this one will also have a 'Small Icons Mode'.

So...main buttons now in place and fully working -

Image

Using the magic of DOMi, here's how the first four look when hovered over. -

Image

So, good progress. This'll be out around November, so loads of time to go. Mind you, I also have loads of other things to do from now on, so I'll fit this in small chunks around all that. Rather than doing the rest of the icons yet, I might put the backgrounds on next, so that it'll look a lot more AK2ish.

:)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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Re: Aluminium Kai 2.

Post by jimfitter »

Looks great. Remember, this is something you can release with imperfections, and count on us to point them out. :-P
Inside every old man is a young man wondering what the hell happened. - Terry Pratchett
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