https://ae.amigal...5494;image

This is my latest theme project called the "Mahogany Theme".

The button design is complete. Now I just need to finish making the theme and config.

The AROS Curved Blue Theme is almost complete.

When the 4 blue templates (blue prototypes) in this series are complete they will be uploaded to AROS Archives.

This is a sample image:

https://www.dropb...2&dl=0

Making new window themes is a slow, tedious task. It involves a lot of graphics work in paint programs.

Many of the tasks involved a very repetitive such as making drawers and copying and renaming files.

So I have been writing some tools to help me with these repetitive tasks.

The main tool is designed to work with a theme config file and theme preview image (prototype). The theme preview is a precise size. The config file provides all the offsets and values needed to calculate the coordinates of the theme elements.

So far the program can accurately generate the window Titlebar image from the theme preview image.

It would be great if you shared your work

In the past I did the same: creating tools for helping me on some boring stuff like that.

Now I leave it the LLMs, that excel on those tasks.

If I have 100 themes to make it's a better use of my time to spend 15 minutes in a paint program to put together a theme preview which is similar to a theme screenshot then press a button and have a computer prepare the new theme for AROS.

The program prepares and packages the new theme in less than a second. Whereas before it took about 2 hours to do the same thing.

It's not as easy as copying a block of pixels from the preview image. First you copy the pixels into a buffer then write that to a new buffer. Make a copy of the first buffer then go the grey scale, adjust luminosity and copy that array below the first one. But I did successfully do that for the 2-state window Titlebar. The window gadgets themselves are 4-state sprite sheets with 4 images each. The offsets and coordinates are a real challenge to keep them straight.

The window Titlebar image isn't perfect though. The grey scale portion for the inactive state does not match the config hex colors. So I will need to adjust luminosity also.

The theme tools are being built around the OS4 window theme. It will be adjusted for other themes. Or maybe each theme has a custom theme replicator and packager.

If I use Claude I could probably come up with some tools in a few days. But I'm using traditional methods so it will take longer. I want to fully understand the code I write.

Just saying, it's a long process. :-)

I have improved the LUA program that previews and installs themes, but Claude was unable to get the themes to display without a system restart a complicated operation on AROS. Yet, on AfA OS (AROS for Amiga), themes can be displayed and installed without needing to restart the system.

The Appearance Prefs also install themes with a preview image.

I thought about updating the LUA Theme Manager to C code to make things easier but there was still no easy way to activate the theme in Wanderer without a system restart.

Hmmm...

I think I may have discovered a way to make this process of producing color variations of the same theme much easier and faster as well.

It's "Recolor Theme Elements" based on hex color values in config files. I'm not sure it this will work but I'll try it on the Titlebar image as a test.

From those values ​​I changed the color that Wandere uses to highlight the t