Appearance Manager

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Bill Marriott <wjm at wjm.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Is the Appearance Manager documented anywhere? Or,
> even if it isn't, is 
> there a place where it "lives" and can it be
> hacked/modified? I just ran 
> some stacks under a couple flavors of Linux, Ubuntu
> and Linspire. I think 
> Ubuntu uses Gnome and Linspire uses KDE. In any
> event, Rev didn't pick up 
> the look and feel of either of them; the stack
> controls look like circa 
> 1992.
> 
> Just wondering if it were possible to somehow modify
> the appearances that 
> are there or add new ones. 
> 

Hi Bill,

The "Appearance Manager" is just like any other
lookAndFeel - the engine may hand off the drawing of
the controls to the operating system instead of
drawing those with its internal routines; but you
cannot change the look of the controls.
Revolution is flexible enough to let you simulate
nearly every type of control from script, but it's a
bit of a hassle and results in a lrger number of
controls on your card.

<offtopic>
Java's lookAndFeel system allows you to replace the
rendering with your own, but it's not that easy to
implement the whole array of controls that make up a
UI.
There is however an open-source lookAndFeel calld
'Skin' that allows you to control the appearance of
controls by setting images that are then used to draw
the controls.
A button would be defined by images for the topleft,
topright, bottomleft and bottomright corners and the
texture for the top, right, bottom and left edges that
the lookAndFeel uses to compose the button control.
I think ButtonGadget offers something similar and that
Photoshop users refer to this as 'splicing' - but I
don't do multimedia stuff, so I may very well be waaay
off :-)
</offtopic>

In short, you can't do it out of the box, but it might
be a very interesting feature request to put into
bugzilla - an external API that would allow C-savvy
developers to create their own lookAndFeel.

Cheers,

Jan Schenkel.

Quartam Reports for Revolution
<http://www.quartam.com>

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)


 
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