The font seems to be overridden by the theme, and unfortunately makes most of the text unreadable. Is there a way to let crystal clear use adium’s font settings instead of over riding them? I tried getting shapeshifter to just ignore adium, but then it ignores the entire application and looks rather ugly. Too bad, because I absolutely love your theme.

Screenshot: http://trac.adiumx.com/attachment/ticket/7259/on.png

Now on to my problem. I have loaded the theme and it looks perfect with one exception that I am sure has nothing to do with your theme but with either the nature of the GUI or with the apps I am running. The issue is this, my MenuBar is totally crystal on the left handside of the bar, but on the right handside where my menu apps run, several of them are not adhearing to the theme. One app (MagiCal) seems to not want to play along at all and gives me a light color sold background on the date and a dark color sold background on the time. More wierd then this is the fact that Apple’s own icon for the Volume (the little speaker) is shaded differently as is the battery and the bluetooth icon.

So my question is there anything I can do to unify all of this so I have one nice clean clear menubar?

Just for notes the other two app that are doing this are weather snitch and hardware monitor lite.

My other question is how could I change the window sides to be a sold black instead of the gradent? I know from reading your write up that they can’t be transparent, but I guess I would preffer solid black.

Thank You again for such a wonderful theme, and I look forward to what comes next!!!

Scott

P.S. I can send you a screen shot of the MenuBar if it helps.

What Firefox plugin are you “addicted” to? Chances are, there’s something available for either Camino or the WebKit family that’ll meet your needs. When you consider that Cocoa plugins can also perform cool stuff–either on specific apps or on all, depending on how they’r set up–the number of plugins is larger than it may appear. For example, I use this amazing, free plugin for Safari called Inquisitor that really beefs up the search field.

One of these days, I’ve got to write an article on Cocoa, and why more and more, my personal application decisions include the question, “Carbon or Cocoa?”

Cheers,
Leland

Jason, here is some info about what’s showing in the Lite preview that you may not already know:

• The little tab at the top, with the rounded window that says “Mars Tips…” is Edgies. My review here.
• The digital clock is QuartzClocks, which I reviewed here.
• The transparent window on the left that says “Clipboard History” is a Quicksilver feature, styled to suit, of course.
• The little translucent “moon” in the lower left is DropCopy. It also appears in the menubar.
• The floating menu that says “Main Menu” to the left of the QuartzClock is a feature of OCSmart Hacks, which is a cocoa plugin with too many features to go into here. What I’m using it for there is to display the menu of an application that doesn’t normally have one (Edgies).
• There’s a bunch of stuff in the menubar… some of the more interesting ones, which I may have reviewed in the Software part of the site (from left to right): Pinki, MagiCal, Focus Layer, Picture Switcher, OpenMenu, Menu Meters, Fast and Slow. All of these are freebies except for OpenMenu.

Jason, hopefully you’ve read about the menu extras problem by now… unfortunately, I haven’t found a workaround for the problem, which I’ll explain when I publish the next revision to Crystal Clear (probably tomorrow).

Spyke, Duncan, Dom… thanks! Glad you’re enjoying Crystal Clear!

Dom, yes, you can do this. The installer puts SetAlphaValue in the main /Library folder, but if you just move it from there to your home Library folder at ~/Library/InputManagers then it’ll only work for you! Just be sure if you drag it from /Library that you move it rather than copying it … otherwise, you’ll end up with two copies.

I’m really sorry about Word… I’ve tried to find a way to disable ShapeShifter for Microsoft Office, but haven’t been able to do so. May I make a suggestion? Get a copy of Pages (part of Apple’s $79 iWork) and use it instead of Word. I’ve done so for 2 years now, and no one at my office even knows I don’t use Word. It’s very good at reading and writing Word … and as I point out in my recent article on Mac spreadsheets, you can even copy and paste Excel data into a Pages table. Pages is much easier to use for setting up small charts and tables than either Word or Excel, in my opinion. Plus, you don’t have any black menubars in Pages.

Cheers,
Leland

Is there a known work-arond for this?

Congratulations on a thoroughly pofessional job!

I also have a problem with this theme in word. The toolbars appear black and so do most of the buttons, so nothing can be seen. It is especially a problem with choosing fonts, since none of them can be seen! other than that, kep up the ood work (maybe try to “mimic” vista apperance for macs!”"

Thanks, by the way, for creating this theme!

First, there’s a bug with SetAlphaValue where if you minimize a window to the Dock and then restore it it turns translucent, even if it’s on top. To restore opacity, you have to click to a different window, then click back. Not a big deal, just a little annoyance.

Having a fogged/sandblasted glass variation would be nice, currently it gets confusing if you have a lot of layered windows.

The progress bars need a little work in my opinion.

If I could do this stuff myself I would, but I’m not too good with ThemePark and it would probably come out very strange.

One more thing - I’m not sure how you would do this, but I think you should inquire about getting your theme on the ShapeShifter mini-feed, so everyone would know about it.

Joy, that font is Augie, though I can’t remember where I got it! I’m pretty sure I used the free TinkerTool program to change the titlebar font, but there are other utilities that will do that, too. (Note, you can do this with the free version of TinkerTool, not the shareware version… though I recommend keeping them both around, since they don’t have overlapping functions.)

What font are you using for the Window titles in the sample shots? Also, how would I go about changing the font?

Thanks.

And i can clearly see how much work has gone into it, thanks for something actually really useful.

With the SetAlphaValue settings menu opened, you can either:
1. Click on the first checkbox, “Disable for this application,” or
2. Change the value of the first slider to a value you prefer (the first slider is set by default to 35). Once you do this, click on the “Default Value” button to the right. This will tell SetAlphaValue that you want this to be the new default value for all windows in all of your applications. You can change any of the other settings if you want, but that’s the main one you’ll want to do.

Alternatively, you can remove SetAlphaValue from your system by deleting the directory “SetAlphaValue” from your /Library/InputManagers folder. (Note that this is the top-level Library folder, not the one in your Home directory.)

Thank you!

Jason, thanks for the tip and your interest in making more graphics. I’ll get back to you soon.

Also, could you email me (JVRosenman@gmail.com) the .png resources for this theme? I would like to make a few application skins that can’t be done with SS and ThemePark (e.g. Quinn), but I can’t get the transparent .png or .psd files. I’d gladly send you the finished themes if you want. And don’t worry, i’d never dream of letting the files loose to the evil world of windows theme rippers.