This one has some mock-ups https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/5025
To MY way of thinking, all those color sliders remind me too much of the Adobe ‘Tintii’ & ‘UrbanLightScape’ Photoshop plug-ins that were re-coded as standalone apps for Linux. I never could get the hang of the adjustments, and I’ve been tinkering with them on & off under Puppy for the best part of a decade…graphic design being a long-standing hobby of mine.
I don’t see the issue with having a proper theme-switcher. What’s the ‘beef’?
@ bitigchi:-
A “Custom” theme option, where users could have detailed control over the system colours would be nice. AFAICS, there are a lot of Haiku users out there with non-orthodox colour schemes.
Mm-hm. You’re probably right. I’ve never yet come across ANY distro that I really like the looks of, OOTB…
I certainly fall into that category, for definite…!
Mike. 
Nice… but imho, Backgrounds needs an overhaul really (or at least I think it’d be nice if it did). I’ve always hoped for and imagined something like how OS X and macOS 11 does it where someone can just pick or drag in a picture and set it, rather than the old school way of going about it.
I didn’t do these mock-ups. There are few “old” tickets like these asking for enhancements in different parts of Haiku. Now that users can vote for tickets, it may be interesting to take the time to check them out.
Here we are messing up with Tracker and better be cautious but this kind of small improvements here and there in Haiku don’t always require a deep knowledge and could be good tasks for beginners…
To came back to Backgrounds, you can already pick up a picture on your disk and drop it in Backgrounds, if it was what you meant. You can also drop a colour from Appearance or another app to use it as background colour.
Personally, I think that this app only needs few adjustments.
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Make more obvious that you are setting up things for folders or the Desktop.
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We should encourage setting up things for the default folder. It isn’t a good idea to set up an image as background for each and every folders.
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The image setting is stored as an attribute of the folder, there should be a graphical way to remove it. Otherwise, even if you remove the image and come back to default setting, it doesn’t follow “default folder” setting.
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On desktop side, there should be also another scaling method.
The actual method tries to scale without distortion till both width and height have reach screen borders and crops what exceeds. It works well most of time but fails for images that don’t have the right aspect ratio for your screen. You can see that trying to scale Haiku logo. I think that in this case, it should scale without distortion but only take care that the biggest dimension fit in the screen. This would leave you with borders but, at least it wouldn’t crop parts of the image. That’s important for people who want to put a family picture for example.
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How about just giving the user the choice between different preset color swatches instead of dumbing down the highly customizable options we have now?
I don’t do “just”.
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I know we probably talked about this a bit already but I do think we should move to some named themes (certainly starting with Light and Dark but with the possibility for the user to add new ones) but still with the possibility of setting colors in detail in those themes (in a theme definition window I suppose.) I don’t think we should need a third-party application to be able to make a detailed color theme. Maybe other aspects of Theme Manager could be kept there (like wallpapers and fonts), though maybe even some of that should just be pulled into the Appearances preflet.
But I do think the default settings should be kept simple and we should have a few well defined themes and I do also like the idea of an accent color which gets applied where appropriate. Ideally we can make the default case simple without then making the complicated case impossible or overly difficult.
Anyhow this is sort of off-topic for this thread.
I don’t know what the point of themes would be in Haiku, I’d just generate the colors based on the given accent color and mode, anything more advanced can be done in the thememanager. Anyhow, yes this is a bit OT, maybe you can move these two replies to the orher thread?
I guess we can see how it looks when you are done but I think it is not ideal to remove existing functionality that some people depend on to make things simpler. I think most people agree the current status quo of a bunch of color sliders is not good but dumbing it down completely is also not ideal.
Something about Theme Manager annoys me, maybe just it feels a bit clunky and many of the themes are very garish. So I personally would rather not be forced to use it if I want to make my own theme. Though I’m sure people will “say patches” welcome on Theme Manager which is fair.
For me a theme is a complete set, that is colors, decorator, wallpaper, controllook and maybe private colors, fonts, replican arangement, screensaver should all be provided as one. I don’t think haiku should add direct support for this intree, I much more prefer the current way where individual stuff can be set if needed.
There should be a seperate application to make themes, package them, share them, install them, if that is theme manager I don’t know, personally I don’t need this funxtionality so never use theme manager.
Now, as for the colors preflet itself it is incredibly hard to use and overly complex, not only is it badly understandable what the sliders do, they also allow you to directly set an invalid color scheme, I don’t think this should be possible at all.
So the question is how to redesign it, one option is to do it similar to MacOS abd have one accent color that determines the main color of the system, in addition to a preference of light on dark or dark on light contrast.
If this prooves insufficient one could add a bit more, but above all it should be simple to use and not posdible to break 
Apart from that there are are severall applications to fix for dark mode, the controllook beeds to be improved etc.
For completeness I’ll attach my personal todo for it below.
(and here is my, albeit hacky, git tree: https://git.gryphno.de/nephele/haiku/commits/branch/nephele-build )
As long as it doesn’t break the custom settings. I’m a fan of those and like the detailed control of my color scheme.
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Not quite finished yet, but wip for webkit 
dark mode page
Light mode page
edit: the dark mode button has the text color forced, the rest hasent. I still need to properly color stuff.
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Image display with dark background:
And with native document color:
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What exactly is an invalid color scheme?
black on black, anything that is unreadable duo to lacking contrast
If that is what the user wishes, I don’t see how that is invalid.
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If it is possible to check contrast algorithmically, then sure. If not, then prolly best to just let users do what they want.
Worked a bit more on the dark mode support, the next version of haikuwebkit should pick the document color the system is configured to use automatically.
edit: this is a html document without any styling, apart from the css value of color-scheme: light dark;
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I’ll try implementing this tommorow, the colors tab can stay behind a “More Colors…” button in the same tab.
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