wanted feedback on windows theme

[Itsmeee]

I'm working on a theme to beautify windows. What are yours thoughts? btw everything here is 100% made by me down to the background so stuff like icons and pointer are crap and I haven;t worked on this a whole lot. Just I thought longhorn is ugly and has no new features and at least needs a new gui.

[Verbal]

:eek:

VERY nice! I'd use it in a heartbeat!

[Ender]

wow dan...that's pro! Tweaking windows will DEFINATELY have to be an EDEN meeting subject. :rup:

[scm007]

Yeah that is 1337, you have skillz, notice the use of the z instead of the s, that is like skills^3.

[Verbal]

wow dan...that's pro! Tweaking windows will DEFINITELY have to be an EDEN meeting subject. :rup:

>=(

lol btw, it's not a theme yet, that's a photoshop picture.

[Itsmeee]

thanks fyi its still in early stages translating it to a usable theme will be the tricky part. I also need to deal with how to hack it in and when. StyleXP might be able to use it but something like a full desktop converstion like blackbox I think its called might be a better idea in the long run.

come to think of it because of how windows handles translating the dekstop in the video I think it would suck as a style xp theme. It would need to be passed to the gpu in pieces instead of as a whole or preformance would suck. Longhorn will do this, as well as windows fx enableed systems. That would mean style xp will work. I'll compile this into a theme over the weekend and see if windows fx can make windows do it properly.

[DiscoDave]

I think it looks super-cool...it's a touch too transparent for my tastes, but that's more of a minor niggle than a deal breaker.

[Ender]

I don't understand why you put a ">=(" in your post jon. :confused:

[SuperDude]

Because he is upset he didnt think of the idea first/ didnt think to make a gui

LOL =P

[Verbal]

I don't understand why you put a ">=(" in your post jon. :confused:

Because you spelled "Definitely" wrong AGAIN!!!1!1!!! :mad:*

[ghrogels]

Because you spelled "Definitely" wrong AGAIN!!!1!1!!! :mad:*
lol, jonwhore

[Ender]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

lol the really really funny part about that is, when you first announced your pet peeve of people spelling it wrong, I made a mental note to spell it wrong on the forums to bug you, but since then forgot about it - so it goes to show that it became a habit! :rofl: I better break that before school starts next quarter. :eek:

[Verbal]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

lol the really really funny part about that is, when you first announced your pet peeve of people spelling it wrong, I made a mental note to spell it wrong on the forums to bug you, but since then forgot about it - so it goes to show that it became a habit! :rofl: I better break that before school starts next quarter. :eek:

lol darn straight... not only will your teachers get pissy about it, I'm gonna pummel you. =)

[Itsmeee]

I think it looks super-cool...it's a touch too transparent for my tastes, but that's more of a minor niggle than a deal breaker.

yeah I think the transparent is to much as well. Here is my vision, tell me if you like it. I think of windows like internet explorer as boxes. They are, I mean they are grey drab boxes with your webpage inside. What if instead you had a semi transparent box surrounding your webpage. So its actually a window to the web, or a window to your hd! The idea is to show what you need but also allow you to see work below and around instead of having all this stuff around. Make it simple but in the simplicity make it a work of art. Its far from right, my biggest issue I think is the buttons. But what do you think and do you have ideas on how to do the middle? Perhaps just keep a white bit there?

[SuperDude]

Sounds like a good concept, but it must be easy on the comp system IMO.

If it can be done i will try it out.

[Itsmeee]

hokia I just did a version to see if its possible and...YES it is :D I built an alpha and windows showed it wrong :( but everything seemed right?? did I do it wrong?? Turns out its a neg, I did it right as the screenshot shows, well sorta some bug is making everything BUT the previews show it wrong :D

[Itsmeee]

hokia just got it to go transparent maximized still haven't figured out what is causing the bug in the normal windows.

edit: dont worry i'm going to make it look less like windows once I get it going.

[Itsmeee]

still working on fixing the title bar, I did find out it wont update what is below it (part of how windows displays the desktop is to fault), so basicly I need to bypass this one of two ways. Constantly updaiting what is behind the window by usuing windows fx to set a transparency of 99% across the board in Explorer which you won't really notice except everything will be updated. This will take some large cpu cycles if your usuing a media player or a graphics editing program which makes it unusable on all but the fastest systems (like it could take 25% of your cpu time possibly, just a guess though). The second option is to go away from explorer which is probably my best bet. I'm looking into alternative shells and other options.

[Itsmeee]

hokia, as big an issue as I was thinking. all the alternative shells for windows sucked and I think were plauged with more possibly problems then explorer for my theme. Anyway from what I understand windows see's the whole desktop as an image while others like osx sees each window as a picture. So basicly if something is behind a window in windows it doesn't think much about it so transparancy would show the last thing displayed in that spot (background or window, whatever). I'm not sure now how this would effect my theme, it might just go haywire and not work well at all but I'll still go ahead and see what happens.

[Itsmeee]

w00t, its going better, got the whole thing going now, though there is still work like actually getting it to work outside of previews :mad: I think it has to do with a size issue, it does realize it SHOULD be doing it right...

edit: erg windows isn't updating it at all no matter where you move it. Only when you make the window tottaly dissapear and reapear like in a minimize maximize situation does this work. I'm mad, cause it looks SO NICE!! ERGGGG

I may be forced to email microsoft and demand they fixify the situation before I go and leech of them :mad:

[Verbal]

Wow dude, those previews are looking AWESOME! :tup:

[Expunge]

Pitty windows knows what to do with the preview, but not the actual window :rolleyes:

GG XP

[Itsmeee]

:slant: yeah pretty messed up, I did get the very edges to do some partial transparancy but its pretty fubar, it gets really messed up really quickly.

and you know the really messed up bit, I was watching and reading a bunch of stuff on msnbc or whatever that site is about longhorn and how it renders and it does a shitty job @ it. They had a box that had some text moving around in 3d and there 3ghz pc was chugging. I mean stuff my ibook could handle easy, and could even morph with bending and color changes etc EASY longhorn was chugging. Even simple animations had longhorn coughing like a chain smoker. Its horrible! I mean whats special about longhorn again? winblows big time :( and I was looking forward to longhorn a few months ago.

[Verbal]

Dan, you make me cry. =( For those of us who can't afford an iBook, Longhorn sucking is a sad thing indeed! ='(

[Itsmeee]

well even for us owning an ibook, we dont want everyone else to suffer. Basicly this means unless ms suprises us were going to have linux and osx take large parts of the market over (probably a lot going to linux). I think due to viri etc and broken ms promises that horrible thing which I thought could not happen may. :(

oh btw dev on this project has stopped as my pc shut down last night and wont boot. ah wel