AROS Window Themes

[miker1264]

I spent a couple hours studying the structure of the OS3, OS4, Morphos & AROS themes.

The OS3 & OS4:theme structures seem to be good for producing AROS themes. The artwork is 24bit PNG. Of those two styles the OS4 themes seem most similar to AROS as far as bitmaps which are 24bit PNG and the Config file is also very similar. The OS3 PNG images seem to be in pieces. It's all there but it's like a jigsaw puzzle. 

I'm in the process of porting an OS3 theme (skin). So far I have pieced together the Titlebar image. It's not a simple task. It may take several hours to piece it all together.

The bright green sample on top is the OS4 Lime Green theme that I finished yesterday. The forest green sample on bottom is the new OS3 theme being converted for AROS. The Titlebars are of different heights (26 & 23) so I may need to adjust that in the custom config file. The OS3 theme doesn't seem to have a config file so I need to make one.

[miker1264]

Here are a few OS3 themes I'd like to make for AROS. See screenshot.

Tree Hugger on top in the middle is the one I'm currently working on. I also may try to make Pea Soup and LiteMetal. The problem with some of them is that the buttons are just transparent 32bit PNG images of just the line work that need to be composited over the 24bit colored bar images.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Here themes are not from OS3 "Incompatible with AROS/OS4/MOS", they are from AfA OS Amiga OS 3.9  BB4, you can find them all on AfA One, there are also ones created by me.

Also AfA OS is the only OS that can change Themes on the fly without rebooting the system, you can see the theme change on this old video of mine:

https://youtu.be/Y-0gQFB8dQw

[miker1264]

Here themes are not from OS3 "Incompatible with AROS/OS4/MOS", they are from AfA OS Amiga OS 3.9  BB4, you can find them all on AfA One, there are also ones created by me.

Also AfA OS is the only OS that can change Themes on the fly without rebooting the system, you can see the theme change on this old video of mine:

https://youtu.be/Y-0gQFB8dQw

Are those themes from OS3.9 BB4 or from AfA OS ? The structure based on the video looks like the OS3.x themes I'm trying to convert for AROS x86. The folders all have numbers and the PNG files all have .info extensions.

I have Amiga OS 3.5 & OS3.9 as well as the OS3.9 BB's up to BB4. I could look in there for any OS3.x themes. These "skins" only seem to be for OS3.5/3.9 since OS3.1 doesn't seem to have anything but a basic built-in window theme.

For the AROS x86 themes I'm actually making them based on samples from Amiga OS3 & OS4. Some others are color variations based on existing AROS themes. Most of the artwork is there in some form, but some needs to be made from pieces or approximated based on other similar themes.

For example in the OS3 Forest Green theme based on "Tree Hugger" skin only the scrollbars and titlebar have pieces of images that need to be assembled. All else including config file must be made new. For the buttons I may use my OS4 Lime Green theme and approximate the colors to match.

Although programming is fun and very rewarding, graphics design is what I do on a daily basis so this is all very interesting. 

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Those themes as said belong to AfA OS, actually AfA OS also installs on OS 3.1 and OS 3.1.4, AfA OS is not only supported by OS 3.2, but you can use it "partially" to bring Antialiased Fonts to OS3.2, we discussed it HERE on AEB.

As mentioned it would be nice to take advantage of the AfA OS (AROS for AMIGA) capability to get a hot theme change without rebooting, basically in my opinion just rebooting Wanderer would be enough !

[NinjaCowboy]

Is there a way to use antialiased truetype fonts in the titlebar? It's subtle, but would make it look more modern.

I suspect the Titlebar Font is controlled by the Config file.

TrueType Fonts would look better if that can be achieved.

The latest version of Icaros has antialiased title bar fonts, and they look quite nice.

[miker1264]

Try this OS4 Lime Green theme to see if it uses the antialiased fonts.

[miker1264]

I finished the images for three new themes:
OS4 Forest Green, OS4 Cocoa Brown & OS4 Powder Blue.
OS4 only refers to the layout style of the window theme.

You can see which colors are for each theme from the color of the sliders in the screenshot. It seems that slightly darker colors are better for contrast. The Lime Green theme is nice but it's difficult to read the title text, for me at least.

It only took three hours for these so it's getting easier. It's an average of about two hours per theme for complete assembly.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

For Themes with uniform image like that of OS4 and quick and easy to do it manually, when you have to use backgrounds like "Tiffany", to match the gadgets becomes complicated.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Try this OS4 Lime Green theme to see if it uses the antialiased fonts.

Definitely Dark Colors with Wanderer the "White" Fonts look Great on AROS One, see screnshot, for the system uses I use "Arial" and "ttcourier" Fonts, Dopus5 by default uses "Black" Fonts and I don't know if it makes use of Antialiased Fonts.

Actually I don't know if the Fonts included in AROS are all anti-aliased including "Arial"

[miker1264]

This is my new OS4 Style - Forest Green theme.

I think it looks better than the Lime Green theme. 

Many other themes on the way...

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Try this OS4 Lime Green theme to see if it uses the antialiased fonts.

I have tried using the same Fonts with Dopus5 Magellan, the difference is obvious, the fonts on Wanderer look qualitative, better even than Windows, the DualPNG Icons on Wanderer look better graphically, on Dopus5 there is a loss of quality even in the Glow, Also the quality of the Theme is better on Wanderer

Also the icon arrangement is not professional, to order the icons you have to do it by hand one by one, otherwise the automatic arrangement arranges them in a messy way, without using the spaces.

I enclose scrennshot of Dopus5 Magellan on AROS One, the resolution is not the best, but it is the same as the one made with Wanderer (screenshot above), in fact the screenshot of Wanderer given the quality the file had a bigger size so I had to degrade it, try to do these tests too, of course for Wandere you have to use AROS One !

[NinjaCowboy]

The green OS4 theme looks very nice! I like it.

[miker1264]

AMIGASYSTEM

You said that AfA OS can "Hot Swap" themes without restarting. But doesn't AfA OS use Amiga Workbench instead of Wanderer? And it also uses Amiga Intuition.

I'm not sure how that works but on AROS there is a file in Env-Archive/SYS called "theme.var" that changes when a new theme is loaded. It is just a text file with the name of the new theme such as "os4_forest green".

At startup Intuition must load all the elements in the theme specified in theme.var into memory for rendering. I say it loads it all into memory because I was using my new os4_forest green theme to open windows at the same time that I was deleting files from the current theme! But the deleted images had no effect for the current session. Everything seemed to work fine for drawing windows.

Perhaps Wanderer & Dopus Magellan need to restart so that Intuition can load the new theme into memory? But how does AfA OS store the new theme? Or does it simply read it directly without storing it in memory? Since Amiga OS is very thrifty with memory maybe it reads the theme elements directly from the themes directory each time it renders a new window. I'll have to research it further.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Yes AfA OS uses Workbench, the file that contains the setting is called default.afaprefs, when you change theme it is immediate.

Basically you can change on the fly without any kind of reboot being done, you can also utilize USE without saving, see small video attached.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JhBhccgMHlJBqyLGhgB9dVIzBYv5Omev/view?usp=sharing