2 Nov
2008
2 Nov
'08
7:01 p.m.
FWIW, my opinion is that any deep integration
is going to be hard, and that for the moment
we should go with something much simpler:
simply support mstheme files well, and provide
themes that look like the default themes on
Ubuntu / OpenSuse / Fedora.
2 Nov
2 Nov
7:21 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2008/11/2 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
FWIW, my opinion is that any deep integration
is going to be hard, and that for the moment
we should go with something much simpler:
simply support mstheme files well, and provide
themes that look like the default themes on
Ubuntu / OpenSuse / Fedora.
Yes. That's why I ordered the level of integration the way I did
(colours, msstyles, deep integration).
- Reece
10:28 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
FWIW, my opinion is that any deep integration
is going to be hard, and that for the moment
we should go with something much simpler:
simply support mstheme files well, and provide
themes that look like the default themes on
Ubuntu / OpenSuse / Fedora.
I agree. I simply think any outside tools we develop should be used in
conjunction with a proposed formal standard. If the MS formats are
open there is no reason we cannot propose the usage of them, or a
variation on them as part of FreeDesktop making Wine play nicer with
everyone (mono and moonlight prove MS standards and formats can be of
use for Linux). I'll spend some of the copious amounts of free-time I
have at work researching for formats and we can continue the propose
standard discussion off list later in the week.
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
10:52 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
For fun I looked a bit at the format. An msstyles file is just a win32 resource file. It
contains various sections each containing strings, colors or bitmaps. Colors are just
stored in a text file. Uxtheme parses this text file and loads the colors 1:1 from this
section into the registry.
The main issue is creating a resource file it can either be compiled using wrc or it could
an empty file could be created from a program and then updated using UpdateResource and
friends. The first solution is the nicest way but not everyone might install wrc.
Anyway desktops will never move to this microsoft format. I think both gtk and qt are now
moving to xml based formats. We could define our own spec for that but I doubt they will
move to this. They attempted before to use the same theme format but it didn't work
out well.
Roderick
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Dan Kegel
<dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
--
Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten
Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser
FWIW, my opinion is that any deep integration
is going to be hard, and that for the moment
we should go with something much simpler:
simply support mstheme files well, and provide
themes that look like the default themes on
Ubuntu / OpenSuse / Fedora.
I agree. I simply think any outside tools we develop should be used in
conjunction with a proposed formal standard. If the MS formats are
open there is no reason we cannot propose the usage of them, or a
variation on them as part of FreeDesktop making Wine play nicer with
everyone (mono and moonlight prove MS standards and formats can be of
use for Linux). I'll spend some of the copious amounts of free-time I
have at work researching for formats and we can continue the propose
standard discussion off list later in the week.
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
3 Nov
3 Nov
2 a.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Roderick Colenbrander
<thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Anyway desktops will never move to this microsoft
format.
I think both gtk and qt are now moving to xml based formats.
We could define our own spec for that but I doubt they will move to this.
Right, I doubt we can have any influence on them.
That's why I think we should focus on the most
superficial kind of compatibility, i.e. just supporting
Windows theming and providing theme files that
make us look not so jarring.
I doubt we can ever do automatic theme extraction.
- Dan
6:58 a.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2008/11/3 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Roderick Colenbrander
<thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net> wrote:
I was not proposing that Gtk and the other frameworks adopted the
msstyles format (which has changed in Vista to an unintelligible
binary format).
What I was proposing, after some discussion, was standardising at the
*API* level. Something that would be acceptable with (and have the
buy-in from) the toolkit writers and key applications. The various
toolkits would still use their current formats for those themes. Wine
could then use this standardised API,
Alternatively, there could be a Universal Theming Engine that does the
same thing. That would be an external project that provides bindings
to at least the major theming engines available, but such that
applications can use it to simplify their code. Wine could then use
this external library.
But Dan is right, the first step for Wine is making the
uxtheme/msstyles support work well so that it can be used by
distributions to theme Wine.
Another thing that potentially needs resolution is that Vista has
added support for theming menus, but this will require us to use the
new binary msstyles if Wine intends to properly support this without
adding our own custom extensions to the XP format. This is where
deeper integration will help: an XP msstyles theme will not support
menu theming, but a native theme will.
Anyway desktops will never move to this microsoft
format.
I think both gtk and qt are now moving to xml based formats.
We could define our own spec for that but I doubt they will move to this.
Right, I doubt we can have any influence on them.
That's why I think we should focus on the most
superficial kind of compatibility, i.e. just supporting
Windows theming and providing theme files that
make us look not so jarring. I doubt we can ever do automatic theme extraction.
Agreed.
- Reece
15 Nov
15 Nov
4:17 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:58 PM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
.. the first step for Wine is making the
uxtheme/msstyles support work well so that it can be used by
distributions to theme Wine.
BTW, has anybody noticed a speed problem with our
theme support?
http://finance.addblogger.com/2008/11/15/how-to-install-picasa-3-in-linux-v…
complains
"while WINE does accspt themes, those are Windows themes, and they are
VERY SLOW. You're better off just keeping the default theme, but using
your Linux color scheme..."
4:37 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2008/11/15 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:58 PM, Reece Dunn
<msclrhd(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Yes.
If you use some themes (e.g. the Zune theme from Microsoft) then the
performance is ok. If you try other themes (e.g. the Gem theme from
the StyleXP program) then it renders very slowly - the performance
killer in the Gem theme is rendering the parent background for
property sheets (e.g. winecfg). This can clearly be seen in winecfg
when switching themes.
I believe there were discussions about this earlier that tracked it
down to theme parts having alpha channels in their bitmaps.
It may also be that as several of the theming APIs are using double
buffering. Vista has some APIs that help out with double buffered
drawing (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ has a nice video (requires
Silverlight) from the latest PDC -
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC43/ - that covers them in some
detail). These may help improve performance.
In addition, the DIB engine is likely to prove invaluable here, as
there will be a lot of drawing and blitting, which will certainly be
killing performance at the moment with the X server round trip.
Do you know if the DIB engine is advanced enough to test this? Theming
would make an interesting test case.
- Reece
.. the first step for Wine is making the
uxtheme/msstyles support work well so that it can be used by
distributions to theme Wine.
BTW, has anybody noticed a speed problem with our
theme support?
14 Jan
14 Jan
10:48 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
2008/11/15 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
FWIW,
http://www.ubuntuproductivity.com/journal/software/01/2009/theme-wine-integ…
is a report of a happy user, so I guess the Human theme is ok.
Maybe the Ubuntu package should come with that theme applied,
or at least included and easy to turn on.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:58 PM, Reece Dunn
<msclrhd(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Yes.
If you use some themes (e.g. the Zune theme from Microsoft) then the
performance is ok. If you try other themes (e.g. the Gem theme from
the StyleXP program) then it renders very slowly - the performance
killer in the Gem theme is rendering the parent background for
property sheets (e.g. winecfg). This can clearly be seen in winecfg
when switching themes. .. the first step for Wine is making the
uxtheme/msstyles support work well so that it can be used by
distributions to theme Wine.
BTW, has anybody noticed a speed problem with our
theme support? I believe there were discussions about this earlier
that tracked it
down to theme parts having alpha channels in their bitmaps.
It may also be that as several of the theming APIs are using double
buffering. Vista has some APIs that help out with double buffered
drawing (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ has a nice video (requires
Silverlight) from the latest PDC -
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC43/ - that covers them in some
detail). These may help improve performance.
In addition, the DIB engine is likely to prove invaluable here, as
there will be a lot of drawing and blitting, which will certainly be
killing performance at the moment with the X server round trip.
Do you know if the DIB engine is advanced enough to test this? Theming
would make an interesting test case.
Give it a try - somebody posted patches for his own mashup of the DIB
engine recently...
- Dan
11:10 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2009/1/14 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
Will do. I'll also give some games a spin to see if it makes a
difference there as well.
- Reece
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Reece Dunn
<msclrhd(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
That's great :).
Not everything works yet (particularly state changes in buttons --
such as pressing a button, or it becoming disabled -- revert it to
non-themed behaviour), but it is getting there.
2008/11/15 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
FWIW,
http://www.ubuntuproductivity.com/journal/software/01/2009/theme-wine-integ…
is a report of a happy user, so I guess the Human theme is ok.
Maybe the Ubuntu package should come with that theme applied,
or at least included and easy to turn on. BTW, has anybody noticed a speed problem with
our
theme support?
Yes.
If you use some themes (e.g. the Zune theme from Microsoft) then the
performance is ok. If you try other themes (e.g. the Gem theme from
the StyleXP program) then it renders very slowly - the performance
killer in the Gem theme is rendering the parent background for
property sheets (e.g. winecfg). This can clearly be seen in winecfg
when switching themes. In addition,
the DIB engine is likely to prove invaluable here, as
there will be a lot of drawing and blitting, which will certainly be
killing performance at the moment with the X server round trip.
Do you know if the DIB engine is advanced enough to test this? Theming
would make an interesting test case.
Give it a try - somebody posted patches for his own mashup of the DIB
engine recently...
15 Jan
15 Jan
8:12 a.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Reece Dunn
<msclrhd(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:
Yes.
If you use some themes (e.g. the Zune theme from Microsoft) then the
performance is ok. If you try other themes (e.g. the Gem theme from
the StyleXP program) then it renders very slowly - the performance
killer in the Gem theme is rendering the parent background for
property sheets (e.g. winecfg). This can clearly be seen in winecfg
when switching themes.
FWIW,
http://www.ubuntuproductivity.com/journal/software/01/2009/theme-wine-integ…
is a report of a happy user, so I guess the Human theme is ok.
Maybe the Ubuntu package should come with that theme applied,
or at least included and easy to turn on.
A while ago when I looked at how XP theme files worked I also took a look at this theme. I
don't think any package should ship this theme the same for other XP themes. The
problem is that all XP theme 'creators' are in fact editors which use original XP
themes as templates. The basic clearlooks theme I made a while ago is clean though. We
really need to be able to create our own themes but as I showed it is quite a bit of work
but it isn't that hard.
Roderick
--
Psssst! Schon vom neuen GMX MultiMessenger gehört? Der kann`s mit allen:
http://www.gmx.net/de/go/multimessenger
2008/11/15 Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>om>:
> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:58 PM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:
.. the first step for Wine is making the
uxtheme/msstyles support work well so that it can be used by
distributions to theme Wine.
BTW, has anybody noticed a speed problem with our
theme support? I believe there were discussions about this
earlier that tracked it
down to theme parts having alpha channels in their bitmaps.
It may also be that as several of the theming APIs are using double
buffering. Vista has some APIs that help out with double buffered
drawing (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ has a nice video (requires
Silverlight) from the latest PDC -
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC43/ - that covers them in some
detail). These may help improve performance.
In addition, the DIB engine is likely to prove invaluable here, as
there will be a lot of drawing and blitting, which will certainly be
killing performance at the moment with the X server round trip.
Do you know if the DIB engine is advanced enough to test this? Theming
would make an interesting test case.
Give it a try - somebody posted patches for his own mashup of the DIB
engine recently...
- Dan 
8:33 a.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2009/1/15 Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net>et>:
A while ago when I looked at how XP theme files worked
I also took a look at this theme. I don't think any package should ship this theme the
same for other XP themes. The problem is that all XP theme 'creators' are in fact
editors which use original XP themes as templates. The basic clearlooks theme I made a
while ago is clean though. We really need to be able to create our own themes but as I
showed it is quite a bit of work but it isn't that hard.
Have you written a HOWTO on this, perhaps suitable for the wiki? Would
be most useful for the future!
- d.
10:21 a.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2009/1/15 Roderick Colenbrander
<thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net>et>:
I submitted my work to wine-devel a couple of months ago (see
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.wine.devel/64542/). I attached a sample
theme file with just coloring (XP style coloring; this is slightly different from the old
coloring method in the registry as some names change). The file clearly shows how to
create a simple theme from scratch. Adding bitmaps is more involved though but not that
hard.
Roderick
--
Sensationsangebot verlängert: GMX FreeDSL - Telefonanschluss + DSL
für nur 16,37 Euro/mtl.!* http://dsl.gmx.de/?ac=OM.AD.PD003K1308T4569a
A while ago when I looked at how XP theme files
worked I also took a
look at this theme. I don't think any package should ship
this theme the same
for other XP themes. The problem is that all XP theme 'creators' are in
fact editors which use original XP themes as templates. The basic clearlooks
theme I made a while ago is clean though. We really need to be able to
create our own themes but as I showed it is quite a bit of work but it isn't
that hard.
Have you written a HOWTO on this, perhaps suitable for the wiki? Would
be most useful for the future!
- d.
2:17 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
2009/1/15 Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k(a)gmx.net>et>:
I submitted my work to wine-devel a couple of months
ago (see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.wine.devel/64542/). I attached a
sample theme file with just coloring (XP style coloring; this is slightly different from
the old coloring method in the registry as some names change). The file clearly shows how
to create a simple theme from scratch. Adding bitmaps is more involved though but not that
hard.
I've added your message to the wiki, with some editing:
http://wiki.winehq.org/XPThemes
Please correct as needed :-)
- d.
3 Nov
3 Nov
11:48 p.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
I made some progress. As I mentioned last time a .msstyles theme is just a resource file
wrapped into a dll. Windows tools try to edit real themes or create themes by injecting
resource data into a blank dll.
In order to obtain a resource file I used a tool called resource hacker to retrieve one
from a GPLed clearlooks theme (most windows theme tools only provide binaries or some
usefuless xml files). A msstyles file contains various section which contain the msstyles
version (PACKTHEM_VERSION), the different color version of the theme (COLORNAMES). The
real info is burried inside 'ini files' which are stored inside the
'TEXTFILES' section of the file (the names of the ini files correspond to
FILERESNAMES). Each ini file contains a bunch of sections for buttons, textboxes and all
other controls. There's also a generic 'SysMetrics' section which contains
some classic properties like ActiveCaption and others. The control specific ones are the
most important and they contain the dimensions of lets say a button, where to position
text, what DPI to use and more.
Initially my idea was to create a sample .msstyles project but this looks like a huge task
as I would need to fill in every attribute of each control. If I would provide an
incomplete theme (which might be legal not sure) the current theming code in Wine will
fail as it expects theme info to be around.
As everyone is aware of big improvements are needed to the comctl32 theming code and other
places which need to draw using themes. For example in case of a button the current
drawing code calculates the position for drawing text iself while it should get this info
from the theme. The same for other controls.
Roderick
For fun I looked a bit at the format. An msstyles file
is just a win32
resource file. It contains various sections each containing strings, colors or
bitmaps. Colors are just stored in a text file. Uxtheme parses this text
file and loads the colors 1:1 from this section into the registry.
The main issue is creating a resource file it can either be compiled using
wrc or it could an empty file could be created from a program and then
updated using UpdateResource and friends. The first solution is the nicest way
but not everyone might install wrc.
Anyway desktops will never move to this microsoft format. I think both gtk
and qt are now moving to xml based formats. We could define our own spec
for that but I doubt they will move to this. They attempted before to use
the same theme format but it didn't work out well.
Roderick
--
Psssst! Schon vom neuen GMX MultiMessenger gehört? Der kann`s mit allen:
http://www.gmx.net/de/go/multimessenger
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Dan Kegel
<dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
--
Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten
Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser
FWIW, my opinion is that any deep integration
is going to be hard, and that for the moment
we should go with something much simpler:
simply support mstheme files well, and provide
themes that look like the default themes on
Ubuntu / OpenSuse / Fedora.
I agree. I simply think any outside tools we develop should be used in
conjunction with a proposed formal standard. If the MS formats are
open there is no reason we cannot propose the usage of them, or a
variation on them as part of FreeDesktop making Wine play nicer with
everyone (mono and moonlight prove MS standards and formats can be of
use for Linux). I'll spend some of the copious amounts of free-time I
have at work researching for formats and we can continue the propose
standard discussion off list later in the week.
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
19 Nov
19 Nov
12:21 a.m.
New subject: Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes
On 02.11.2008 23:28, Steven Edwards wrote:
I agree. I simply think any outside tools we develop
should be used in
conjunction with a proposed formal standard.
I've just seen this:
http://www.andreasn.se/blog/?p=91
In short, there is work being done on a GTK+ theming engine that uses
CSS(!) for describing themes. If that pans out ... arguably you could
cover quite a good part of a hypothetical 'formal standard' by just
reusing CSS.
-f.r.
5584
days inactive
5658
days old
15 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
Dan Kegel -
David Gerard -
Frank Richter -
Reece Dunn -
Roderick Colenbrander -
Steven Edwards