Viewer Themes (Custom)

[Nick0678]

Many times in the past i designed custom themes for Firestorm so it looks the way i prefer

...and i am wondering if there are others here in the Forum who also design their own themes.

If you do , feel free to post here so i can see your work and perhaps get new ideas.

(*Full custm themes are preferred but if you just want to show toolbar buttons configurations that's fine.)

 

Here are some of mine:

[ Aura SVX  (2022 - current) *video ]

 

 

[ Aura One (2020 - 2022) *video]

 

[ Relentless ( 2017 - 2020 ) ]

 

[ Relentless V2 ( 2017 - 2020 ) ]

 

 

[ Relentless Mini ( 2017 - 2020 ) ]

 

[NiranV Dean]

Seeing that these move the entire main UI around completely and knowing how painful it can be to make fully custom UI's i can tell that this wasn't easy.

[Nick0678]

On 2/23/2023 at 6:08 PM, NiranV Dean said:

Seeing that these move the entire main UI around completely and knowing how painful it can be to make fully custom UI's i can tell that this wasn't easy.

Took a while to figure out the xml files back in 2017 but other than that it's only a matter of adding few more icons and transparencies where necessary.

Photogenic spots suggestions during login/teleport screens are web based content from a local HTTP server and could be online ads or whatever if the clients were ad-supported , text-to-speech is done by using Pico (svox).

[NiranV Dean]

7 minutes ago, Nick0678 said:

Took a while to figure out the xml files back in 2017 but other than that it's only a matter of adding few more icons and transparencies where necessary.

Photogenic spots suggestions during login/teleport screens are web based content from a local HTTP server and could be online ads or whatever if the clients were ad-supported , text-to-speech is done by using Pico (svox).

In that case the UI is probably very static and doesn't contain any moving or dynamic parts (other than the toolbar drop area) i assume unless you can tell individual buttons to be aligned top or bottom the 4 split side toolbars for instance seem impossible to do without adding them statically (simply buttons rather than toolbars)

[Nick0678]

On 2/25/2023 at 2:53 PM, NiranV Dean said:

In that case the UI is probably very static and doesn't contain any moving or dynamic parts (other than the toolbar drop area) i assume unless you can tell individual buttons to be aligned top or bottom the 4 split side toolbars for instance seem impossible to do without adding them statically (simply buttons rather than toolbars)

The buttons on the top bar of Relentless themes (had multiple versions of it) were static, the side/bottom toolbars buttons were dynamic, you could swap them with other buttons but the toolbars themselves as a design were fixed, so you either had them on with the buttons you liked or off (no shrinking)

I no longer use that theme, deleted it a couple of years ago and started from scratch the Aura theme which looks similar to my xfce desktop.

 

.. here are a few more i found in my old photos archive.

 

Relentless (*various old ones)

 

 

Aura .. (*early 2021 version)

 

[NiranV Dean]

Sadly you most likely won't see much Themes or Skins here. Most users don't know you can even skin the Viewer without touching the code, let alone have the (arguably simple) text editing skills nor patience to do so.

But in case you haven't figured this out yet, (something Firestorm hadn't figured out in years in their classic V1 skin and possibly still haven't) you can set scaling rectangles for your textures. Textures that are meant to scale without stretching unique parts of the texture (such as corners for instance, or the rounded ending of a line such as in your tabs and filter editors) can have a scaling rectangle set, the Viewer will only use the defined area of said texture for scaling purposes and use the rest of the texture as is to match the total width and height. Say your line edges are 5 pixels wide and the total texture is 100 pixel, you could set the scaling rectangle to start left="6" and end right="94" this would make the "inner" repeating part scale and stretch while the outer rounded edges stay intact and don't stretch. To prevent the texture weirdly squishing in the scaling rectangle part i'd recommend keeping the textures as small as possible, squeezing everything between 6 and 94 to say 2 pixels can cause the stretched part to look weird, so instead i'd use a texture that is only 16 pixels wide, 10 for the edges (5 start and end each) and 6 pixel inbetween to stretch properly, that way the texture can scale all the way down to 16 pixel (and usually even lower all the way to 10 pixels) without looking weird.

Scaling rectangles can be set in the textures.xml (skins/SKINNAME/textures) where you define all textures you want to call via names.

<texture name="ScrollArrow_Down" file_name="widgets/ScrollArrow_Down.png"	preload="true" scale.left="2" scale.top="13" scale.right="13" scale.bottom="2" />

The file even explains it at the top:

Quote

scale.left="1"
scale.bottom="1"
scale.top="15"
scale.right="31"
    - Specifies the segmentation for 9-slice image scaling.  Specifically, the pixel offsets from the LOWER LEFT corner
      that define the region of the image that is stretched to make the whole image fit in the required space.
      In this example, if the source image is 32x16 pixels, we have defined a center region that starts one pixel up
      and to the right from the bottom left corner and extends to 31 pixels right and 15 pixels up from the bottom left
      corner.  The end result is that the image will keep a 1 pixel border all around while stretching to fit the required
      region.

Edited March 3, 2023 by NiranV Dean