Re: ANNOUNCEMENT : Camaelon, GNUstep theme bundle

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Nicolas,

Nicolas Roard wrote:
> I'm happy to announce the release of Camaelon, a basic theme engine
> for GNUstep. Not yet very configurable, and there are some issues, but 
> it works.

I had a look at Camaelon and I quite like it (most of all the name!). 
There are though a few things that worry me about it. Most of this is 
the patch to integrate it into GNUstep. We cannot redefine functions as 
NSDrawButton to do something different than their specification (and 
OpenStep and MacOSX here have the same), just because you want your 
buttons not to be filled with gray. If you really think that themes need 
a different behaviour here all the places where NSDrawButton and the 
other functions that you changed are used have to be redefined. BTW, 
judging from the documentation this is what MacOSX does itself.

The changes you made to redefine the system colour list is the other 
part I don't fancy. There is no need for this, you just could supply our 
own system colour list with the colours you want to have. The problem 
here is perhaps that there is still no GNUstep colour list colour 
picker, so colour list are currently not that visible, but they are the 
way to go for. We really should provide a way to create and edit them, 
so all this other ways to changes colours wont be used any more.

BTW, I was also wondering, why you did define all your colours 
explicitly, but this might just be for the same reason.

I would like to steal a bit of the drawing code from GraphicToolbox, at 
least the gradient drawing, to include it into gui and back. Would this 
be fine for you? We could also restructure the gui drawing methods a 
bit, to make overwriting easier, by spliting them up more. Some years 
ago I did discuss the spliting of the cell border drawing in a seperate 
method. Of course than a theme would have to overwrite internal methods 
instead of public ones.

Fred