ReactOS Forum

Hi there,

since most of the readers here know about that ability of ROS to handle themes soon, I thought it´d be nice to discuss an "official" ROS theme, and maybe have a contest with a jury or stuff for the 0.3 release. So it can come up with a good and fresh look.

Personally I would feel like a "out of the box" theme should look serious, minimalistic and clean. For that reason I modified my WinXP to use themes as well and had a look for themes out there that´d match this. I found "clearlooks" which is commonly used on Linux desktops and looks excellent combined with Tango Icons. Yet I have no idea on how to use the tango icons on my desktop, but I thought I´d attach a screenshot of how that looks on a windows GUI. Find it here

I think something along the line of the reluna themes by Bant.

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.p ... =6537&st=0
http://www.deviantart.com/view/14801572/

They are very simple, but effective.

IDD, looks very good. I think if the ROS team would call for a "themecontest" there would be dozens of good applications. Pitty they havent done yet.

The "clearlooks" theme is one of the crappiest i've ever seen. It looks like a bad copy of the already-bad Windows XP default style. The colours are dull, dirty and lifeless, as are those from the Tango icon theme. There is absolutely nothing slick or nice about them, they just look dirty and disgusting.
Check out these styles:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview ... +DeKorator
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview ... &name=tiny
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview ... +deKorator
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview ... +deKorator
http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview ... e=Pureline

Most of these have a vertical gradient and I would also think that a vertical gradient would look better than the default horizontal. It could be activated by a simple switch in the appearence tab of desk.cpl (wich is not implemented yet) and a little patch, I made recently. It's also faster than a horizontal gradient And with complete appearence tab you can choose colors for yourself. Exchanging the colors would make it look more konkav instead of convex. To create a real 3D look, we would need a new 3D gradient function. Maybe i can create a slightly modificated clone of the original gradient function.
[ external image ]
Flat (maybe alphablended to match the backgroundcolor) Sys-Buttons would be nice, too. I think the ones in clearlooks are quite nice. In fact I like the clearlooks more than most of that from Matthias' links. except the 3rd one that looks great.
If I find some time, I might try to patch w32k a little more, to make ROS captions look a little more like those ones. But I am not a good designer. I can simply try some different things and compare how it looks And the rounded edges might be a little more complicated (additional enumeration of clipping regions). But the rest could be implemented pretty easily into the current GUI and made be switchable by reg-keys.
If you think it's a good idea and have some ideas how the border and the buttons should look like (nothing too complicated, please ), tell me and I will see if I can do it.
BTW: the Forum "captions" inspired me to create the patch.

Matthias,

Blended and Pureline are the only two of your examples I could see as default. The others are just too, well, weird. I personally use a form of blended on my SuSE machine. Its easy on the eyes to figure out the windows's toolbar options.

Look again at the third one, it doesn't look weird at all to me, especially when you look at the dark blue colour theme. And *everything* is better than clearlooks. Even twm.

Is that total annihilation in the screenshot?

I would even design a theme myself if I'd knew how to start when it's done.
Let's just assume I made a basic theme in Adobe Photoshop®, and it's going to be used. Would I have to seperately save the layers as pictures like those ThemeXP managers do?

How's that working?

-Disease