Tom's theme is brilliant. The amount of work that needs to be done on a theme is enormous, and I can't imagine having to dig through the artfile and Sartfiles, replace the assets, and hope that they recompile. The dock blurring is especially brilliant. He deserves thanks from me for his work, which unlocked a couple of things that I found to be mysteries, even being the stubborn git that he is
For the Tiger theme, the installer/uninstaller may be Terminal/script-based rather than using a package installer. It's much easier to back things up that way for later uninstallation, and it's much more in the comfort zone than having to learn how to package things up; at least in my case. The idea for this comes from
@AphoticD, who is helping me test changes as they progress, and I concur that it's probably the best approach for installation/uninstallation, with some caveats (10.4.11 only, experience with running scripts, etc).
Progress-wise, I just got done taking a few days off from the theme, as my eyes were really starting to show/feel the strain. I'll get back to it on Saturday, but here's what needs to be done yet before the next release:
1. Finish fixing/theming the Cocoa assets. A huge pain in the arse, as the way that they're stored quite frankly sucks, and they'll never be absolutely perfect due to how Tiger handles Cocoa resources. Older Cocoa-based apps will be themed, but certain buttons and arrows will look a little weird in certain places (The last version of FileZilla for Tiger is a perfect example). That's Tiger's fault, not mine. Where Leopard got it right by somewhat unifying the resources with CoreUI, Tiger was still a bit of a hodgepodge.
2. Theme all of the text box resources and well resources (the latter also being a huge pain).
3. Finish theming the small segment buttons so that they're accurate.
4. Fix some inaccuracies in the inactive arrow pulldowns/popups and replace the window grow boxes; the absence of which causes some issues. I've also got a couple of minor tiny traffic light issues that need fixing, but that's a quick and easy one.
5. Figure out exactly how to handle changing icons in System Preferences. This cannot be done via Candybar. I changed them all manually by entering each System Preference bundle and replacing the icon, so we'll probably have to script that in. The Spotlight icon doesn't change for some reason, though.
6. Decide on what icons to put together and include in an iContainer for Candybar. I've got a collection of sidebar icons that I use as well as app icons, and others (
@AphoticD, et al) have shared icons as well.
7. Put a list of apps together that approximate some later functionality.
@zappaesque is helping with this effort, and others are welcome to PM or post other ideas.
There are a ton of minor/miscellaneous resources spread throughout Tiger that I'm not going to worry too much about, as many of them are rarely used, and some aren't used at all. I'll get to some of the minor ones at a later date, in a later release. There are Panther resources in the Tiger Extras.rsrc and Finder.rsrc files that aren't used at all anymore, which is somewhat humorous. As a trivia sidenote, the Panther stuff finally disappeared in Leopard's Extras.rsrc and Finder.rsrc.
Following the next release, I'm hoping to work on theming iTunes and look into theming other apps, but I won't go too crazy. There are just too many apps out there using their own embedded resources to get to them all.
All of that said, this theme will never be 100% accurate and will have some minor glitches here and there; some of which I will outline in a readme. For most everyday use, though, the look and feel will be pretty spot-on.
A big thanks to
@AmazingHenry for his earlier efforts in releasing the initial work on this theme. He deserves all of the credit for sorting through all of the crap I sent him, and for his tweaks and suggestions as well. That release of the theme is all him and should forever remain so.
