ThemeChanger 0.5

Well, I have created an icon for ThemeChanger. I can't stand the default app icon that it comes with. If the creator wishes, I could send him the file. At least it would be a temp...i.e. better than nothing.

Ryan


rclark2@gladstone.uoregon.edu


P.S. I don't have a place to post a screen shot. If anyone who does would like to post a ss here, please feel free to email me as well.

That sounds easy. Thanks! You know I will report back if I have any problems! :-]




Send me the icon! I'll post a shot of it!
.... oh! I see you just did! I like it! Very cool!
Others can get it here!
http://homepage.mac.com/mrtew/Themeicon.icns.zip

angus.

great piece of software here. just switched back to aqua and updated to watercolor 1.4.1 without a hitch.

suggestion for a future revision - when you click the switch button, the meter bar fills, and finishes, and leaves you sitting there wondering whether or not it did what it did or not. a confirmation box saying "theme installed - log out and back in to see changes" or "aqua restored - log out and back in to see changes" would be handy i think.

I'm going to leave TC hanging at 0.5 for a month or so, due to lack of time, but sure, I'll add it to the list

Make the Aqua backup optional!!!!! (or did you already)

Yeah, I get the eternal progress bars quite a bit but it always seems to work fine. If this is fixed in the next revision, I think this will be the perfect theme switcher.

I've noticed that when the progress bars seem stuck...if I just click on a menu item the sheet goes away.

No. I will probably make re-installing aqua between themes optional, though, since some people seem to dislike that. Sounds a bit odd. I would look into it, but as I said, I'm not going to look at it for a bit.

Could you also put a "never ask again" checkbox in the "Install tcfix" dialog? I do not allow anything to install into /usr/bin unless it is from Apple. Therefore I copied tcfix to /usr/local/bin, yet ThemeChanger still asks. I could do it myself and send a patch if you would like.

BTW, I just thought I'd let you know that ThemeChanger has been referenced on the macosx-dev@omnigroup mailing list as a perfect example of by-the-book AuthorizationServices example code. Nice job on that.

I can see why you'd do that, but it's not in your path at single-user boot AFAIK, which means (l)users would have to type /usr/local/bin/tcfix, which is just added hassle. I'm reluctant to put a "never ask again" box, because I really want people to have it installed, and people are (in my experience) reluctant to do things (even for their own good). Yeah, I had noticed seeing as I wrote that mail, and it was the only example in a Cocoa application that I've seen that is open-source.

Couple of items:

I was wondering if TC sets permissions on switched resources correctly. I've noticed permission oddities after changing Themes.

I also wanted to tell you that preference settings for TC 0.5 don't seem to be obeyed all the time. I have unchecked killing the Fiinder and Dock, but on occassion the progress sheet will hang at the end with Killing Finder or Dock until I click on a menu as mentioned above.

Yeah, I never implemented that properly. I got bored of working on 0.5 and just made it work really hackishly. If you look at the source, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Is there any chance that the ability to apply themes that are just in the raw Extras.rsrc format will be added?

Isn't it just as hard as that? (Correct me if I'm wrong)

he means a extras.rcrs file that isn't in a .dlta or .theme or .whatever bundle. i think a problem that would occur would be that you couldnt have more than two of such files, and that you woldnt have a clue what it is. what i do is just open up a .theme file and delete everything, put in the new extras.rcrs, and edit the plist(or am i thinking of .dlta?). then you have a bare extras.rcrs but in a nice named package.

Yeah I ended up doing the same thing to get a theme i'm working on to work in ThemeChanger. In Duality I can just have an Extras.rsrc renamed to something like "mytheme.rsrc" and it shows up in the themes list.

I haven't seen a theme distributed as just an extras.rsrc file. If it is, where do you put the metadata about what versions of the system it works with, what its name should be, its description, its copyright strings, etc?

whatever.

I WANT LOCALIZED THEMES!!!

Got any examples?

wish i had.
max made a localized "smooth stripes" once, but it seemed to too much work to keep it up-to-date.

so... what's the deal with "resource-based switching"? i thought that would take care of the missing pieces (e.g. finder toolbar buttons) on non-english systems.