Why Skinning OB Blows
BTW, where did the OB forum go?
Tuesday, January 31, 2006 by brain21 | Discussion: ObjectBar
OK, OB is by far my most used OD app. However, skinning is a pain in the ass (not creating skins, but loading them). Here is the laundry list. Perhaps these can be fixed for the next release, if we ever get one (not holding my breath).
1) I create my own theme. Now I want to skin it with the skin from some other theme. Go to Theme editor>Skin>Change Skin>Use Skin from another theme. It only sees themes that have OBPACKS in the OB directory (no recursion). THis is very annoying, and is behavior repeated in the Theme Browser, which I will get to.
2) Related to #1 - If I want to say BROWSE for a theme to get a skin from, that is NOT an option (at least it is with the theme browser). THis is bad since recursion is not working.
3) Lets say I do have an .obtheme in the OB root directory. If I want to use that skin, I can select it fine. However, if there is no sub-skin (like GenericSkin & GenericSkinMenus & GenericSkinMenus2, etc.) and there is only the main skin, then nothing appears in the "Skin:" drop down, and subsequently I CANNOT use this skin from this other theme!
4) Use Skin from Window Blinds. There are some serious problems here. I can pretty much never get this to work. FOr whatever reason, whenever I select this it ALWAYS uses the skin from my Quantria theme, even though I haven't run that WB skin in forever. It does NOT properly read the current skin. Right now no matter what skin WB is running, it always selects the skin from the Quantria WB skin! WTF?
5) Use a Skin from this theme. Suffers the same recursion problems, and really only populates the drop-down list about half the time.
OK, on to Theme Browser
6) Theme Browser suffers from the same recursion problems as changing skins in the theme editor. I have a bunch of themes. Each one has a "bars" subdirectory. Many of these themes have bars with the same name (like "finder.obbar"). Because of this, my directory structure can NOT be:
\ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury.obtheme
\ObjectBar\bars\finder.obbar
where finder.obbar is the finder menu for bbx-mercury.
Because if I then install Brushed in the same manner, I would get:
\ObjectBar\Brushed.obtheme
\ObjectBar\bars\finder.obbar
finder.obbar would OVERWRITE the other one. Can I rename one? Sure, but then I have to hand edit each & every obbar, etc. that referrs to it. A Much simpler solution (and Stardock uses this for WB, DX, etc. so why not OB?!?!?) is for OB to recurse into directories. THis way I could have:
\ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\BBX-Mercury.obtheme
\ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\bars\finder.obbar
\ObjectBar\Brushed\Brushed.obtheme
\ObjectBar\Brushed\bars\finder.obbar
and have NOT problems. But, unfortunately, this was an oversight. I looked at every setting that I could find in OB bar and didn't see anything that would turn on recursion either.
7) Well, at least in the "Theme Browser" there is a Browse button. So I can navigate to my subdirectory by hand. Unfortunately, say I add a theme, I like it, but I want to try another one. I then load up the 2nd one and decide that I liked the 1st one better. Can I just click on it in the Theme Browser? No. I must then click on browse again and find it. You'd think that once the theme was loaded up by the theme browser it would add it to the list in the GUI...
So currently this is the method I must go through to change the skin on my bar...
a) save my current theme
browse through bars (themes) that I have downloaded and find the ones whose look & fell I like.
c) lets say I want to keep the "finder bar" & "Menu bar" & get rid of the rest & add some from my saved theme. I load up the theme manager. I remove all of the menus and items I don't want. I then must add menu headers for the menus from the theme that I saved in step a. So I add "popup item" Graphics. I add popup item Network. I add popup item Utilities. etc., etc., etc. Then I save.
d) Unload ObjectBar
e) copy (for example) \ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\BBX-Mercury.obtheme to \ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury.obtheme
f) copy the bars from \ObjectBar\MyOldTheme\Bars to \Objectbar\BBX-Mercury\Bars , overwriting the "dummy" ones that I made in step c
g) Edit the BBX-Mercury.obtheme to reflect the new locations of the bar files, & add my new bar files from MyOldTheme to it.
h) Go and edit each one of the \MyOldTheme\Bars\*.obbar files that I moved to \ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\Bars and change the LastSkin portion of the .obbar file to match that of the LastSkin parameter in the finder.obbar
i) save everything and reload ObjectBar.
j) Select and apply my new theme.
WHAT A PAIN IN THE ASS!!!! All of this because the Thenme editor cannot recurse into directories to grab skin files. UGH! Maybe there is a slightly easier way (moving & renaming graphics files), but it doesn't matter. Either way is a kludge.
Also, what would be really nice is to have the concept of bar/menus that can be saved and loaded independantly of the skin or theme. This way if I have a Utility Menu that I really want on all of my bars, I can load up a new theme, and then in the theme editor instead of adding a new popup item I can add a "saved bar". This way I can keep a folder \ObjectBar\SavedBarsAndMenus and I could just load up Utilities.obbar striaght from there. All of the behaviors, etc. would load up right with it, but the skin would automatically change to that of the new skin.
Also, it would be nice to be able to easily edit things like fonts on the menus independantly of the themes. If I have a silver topbar w/ black font and a silver menu w/ black font thats fine & cool. But if the highlight graphic is black, when we highlight over an item we can no longer read it. Being able to select fonts & colors by different criteria would be great. There should be a "Normal" font & color for EACH bar, and a "highlighted" font & color for each bar. These should be indepependant of each other. This way when the black highlight moves over the black text, the text changes to silver so now I can see it.
And this is all just for starters.
So, is 2.0 (release) EVER going to come out? Can we incorporate some of this? Can we fix the RSS feed crash?
Can we bring back the OB sub-forum? Are any of the OB developers reading this?
Thanks,
Brain21
1) I create my own theme. Now I want to skin it with the skin from some other theme. Go to Theme editor>Skin>Change Skin>Use Skin from another theme. It only sees themes that have OBPACKS in the OB directory (no recursion). THis is very annoying, and is behavior repeated in the Theme Browser, which I will get to.
2) Related to #1 - If I want to say BROWSE for a theme to get a skin from, that is NOT an option (at least it is with the theme browser). THis is bad since recursion is not working.
3) Lets say I do have an .obtheme in the OB root directory. If I want to use that skin, I can select it fine. However, if there is no sub-skin (like GenericSkin & GenericSkinMenus & GenericSkinMenus2, etc.) and there is only the main skin, then nothing appears in the "Skin:" drop down, and subsequently I CANNOT use this skin from this other theme!
4) Use Skin from Window Blinds. There are some serious problems here. I can pretty much never get this to work. FOr whatever reason, whenever I select this it ALWAYS uses the skin from my Quantria theme, even though I haven't run that WB skin in forever. It does NOT properly read the current skin. Right now no matter what skin WB is running, it always selects the skin from the Quantria WB skin! WTF?
5) Use a Skin from this theme. Suffers the same recursion problems, and really only populates the drop-down list about half the time.
OK, on to Theme Browser
6) Theme Browser suffers from the same recursion problems as changing skins in the theme editor. I have a bunch of themes. Each one has a "bars" subdirectory. Many of these themes have bars with the same name (like "finder.obbar"). Because of this, my directory structure can NOT be:
\ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury.obtheme
\ObjectBar\bars\finder.obbar
where finder.obbar is the finder menu for bbx-mercury.
Because if I then install Brushed in the same manner, I would get:
\ObjectBar\Brushed.obtheme
\ObjectBar\bars\finder.obbar
finder.obbar would OVERWRITE the other one. Can I rename one? Sure, but then I have to hand edit each & every obbar, etc. that referrs to it. A Much simpler solution (and Stardock uses this for WB, DX, etc. so why not OB?!?!?) is for OB to recurse into directories. THis way I could have:
\ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\BBX-Mercury.obtheme
\ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\bars\finder.obbar
\ObjectBar\Brushed\Brushed.obtheme
\ObjectBar\Brushed\bars\finder.obbar
and have NOT problems. But, unfortunately, this was an oversight. I looked at every setting that I could find in OB bar and didn't see anything that would turn on recursion either.
7) Well, at least in the "Theme Browser" there is a Browse button. So I can navigate to my subdirectory by hand. Unfortunately, say I add a theme, I like it, but I want to try another one. I then load up the 2nd one and decide that I liked the 1st one better. Can I just click on it in the Theme Browser? No. I must then click on browse again and find it. You'd think that once the theme was loaded up by the theme browser it would add it to the list in the GUI...
So currently this is the method I must go through to change the skin on my bar...
a) save my current theme
browse through bars (themes) that I have downloaded and find the ones whose look & fell I like.c) lets say I want to keep the "finder bar" & "Menu bar" & get rid of the rest & add some from my saved theme. I load up the theme manager. I remove all of the menus and items I don't want. I then must add menu headers for the menus from the theme that I saved in step a. So I add "popup item" Graphics. I add popup item Network. I add popup item Utilities. etc., etc., etc. Then I save.
d) Unload ObjectBar
e) copy (for example) \ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\BBX-Mercury.obtheme to \ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury.obtheme
f) copy the bars from \ObjectBar\MyOldTheme\Bars to \Objectbar\BBX-Mercury\Bars , overwriting the "dummy" ones that I made in step c
g) Edit the BBX-Mercury.obtheme to reflect the new locations of the bar files, & add my new bar files from MyOldTheme to it.
h) Go and edit each one of the \MyOldTheme\Bars\*.obbar files that I moved to \ObjectBar\BBX-Mercury\Bars and change the LastSkin portion of the .obbar file to match that of the LastSkin parameter in the finder.obbar
i) save everything and reload ObjectBar.
j) Select and apply my new theme.
WHAT A PAIN IN THE ASS!!!! All of this because the Thenme editor cannot recurse into directories to grab skin files. UGH! Maybe there is a slightly easier way (moving & renaming graphics files), but it doesn't matter. Either way is a kludge.
Also, what would be really nice is to have the concept of bar/menus that can be saved and loaded independantly of the skin or theme. This way if I have a Utility Menu that I really want on all of my bars, I can load up a new theme, and then in the theme editor instead of adding a new popup item I can add a "saved bar". This way I can keep a folder \ObjectBar\SavedBarsAndMenus and I could just load up Utilities.obbar striaght from there. All of the behaviors, etc. would load up right with it, but the skin would automatically change to that of the new skin.
Also, it would be nice to be able to easily edit things like fonts on the menus independantly of the themes. If I have a silver topbar w/ black font and a silver menu w/ black font thats fine & cool. But if the highlight graphic is black, when we highlight over an item we can no longer read it. Being able to select fonts & colors by different criteria would be great. There should be a "Normal" font & color for EACH bar, and a "highlighted" font & color for each bar. These should be indepependant of each other. This way when the black highlight moves over the black text, the text changes to silver so now I can see it.
And this is all just for starters.
So, is 2.0 (release) EVER going to come out? Can we incorporate some of this? Can we fix the RSS feed crash?
Can we bring back the OB sub-forum? Are any of the OB developers reading this?
Thanks,
Brain21
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Reply #1 Friday, August 15, 2008 9:11 PM
OB skining is far and away the most annoying part of Object Desktop and I really can't understand why this is so.
Mitch