Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes

[Roderick Colenbrander]

> On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> > 2008/11/15 Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com>:
> >> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:58 PM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd at 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?
> >
> > 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-integrate-with-ubuntu-human/
> 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.
> 
> > 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

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
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