Right. People should submit their themes to ThemeManager. Let’s add the best 3 to the hpkg and add TM to the beta.
3 Likes
apgreimann, maybe you can contact the creator of past BeOSMax editions ( Vassilis ‘vasper’ Perantzakis ) and work together with him? You even have experience with developing your own distro(s), and you could add your preferred tweaks in a HaikuMax that would be based on a neutral Haiku R1. I’d welcome a HaikuMax, at least.
Be careful with the name choice:
https://www.haiku-os.org/community/guidelines_creating_haiku_distribution
1 Like
To answer this concern, I’ll quote what I’d mentioned earlier in my original post…
Tiling (option 1) would probably be the better choice, mainly because if Haiku did make it scalable, in that the background is selected based on resolution out of a set (option 2), it would take implementing said feature, (and also precious space on the distributed image, what I meant by ‘image size’).
Totally true, and that’s okay. I’m not saying ‘my colors’ have to be the ones that go in. But it’d be nice to have a shade of color accented on controls, etc. and that’s really what I’m trying to show. I know not everyone will agree on the same shade of blue… and mine probably don’t have the feel of Haiku’s official color palette. So, what about just picking the shade Be used from Dano instead of mine or someone else’s? No one would argue with that logic, maybe. I just don’t see how we can go with gray forever.
If you’re serious about your offer, so am I. I do not have this finished, but could easily have a Read Me First page and Quick Tour ready probably this weekend to submit for consideration.
While I kind of made a mistake listing this versus the title of my post (proposals for upcoming beta), but also, I realize this can’t be ready in time for beta1. This is why I wrote next to said section:
While I could demo switching themes and backgrounds inside Web+, technically, I haven’t got a nice, working solution yet that would be worth sharing. Realistically, I’d have to spend a while working on these for them to work.
Thanks for your reply; again, I’ll try to get the basic help done soon.
It is not the image size. Technically a scaleable bg doest have to bigger in file size than a good quality 1080 wallpaper.
But Haiku doesnt support scaleable wp, and it is not planned beta feature. Let me set my wallpaper, and i am ok.
Please, dont. Just dont.
Why do Haiku even need “themes”? I dont care about anybody else and about their favorite colors, why should i? Just give me the otion to define my ui colors, and i am ok. Themes are lame.
Please check the user guide, it is short but well written. Why dont you extend that? Why the redundancy? I dont have ADHD.
Hey, thanks for the reply. 
I have to admit, it’d be super cool to meet him sometime. Though I never understood why Max had a Win-like feel. 
But the question of doing something like Max is a hard question! So let’s discuss me + distros, man.
Thanks for that, but frankly, so far, I don’t have solid experience yet, sadly — I maintained a small Linux distro a few years back, which became the basis for the Poem Couplet alpha1 image. And, well, I’m most likely famous (in a bad way) here and beyond for publicly failing at Poem ( archived here.) Being a failure at a project is never fun. 
At the moment, I’m still trying to work on and finish Couplet (what survived the fall of Poem) in the background. Outside of the Be/Haiku sphere, I also work on a systemd-free live distribution. And I’m quietly working on several personal projects mainly built on Gnu/Linux I plan to roll out as well.
So, from a time perspective, I don’t know even if a HAIKU Max distro similar to the old BeOS Max would be possible, team or not.
But if I could, what’s my thoughts on making “Haiku Max”, or any distro for that matter, for everyone’s reading pleasure?
Well, honestly, I wouldn’t mind helping Haiku from a UI perspective, but it sounds like a good fraction of my ideas that I see as necessary changes are getting shot down. But right now, Haiku is doing good, imho. Much better than Haiku was doing two years ago. And I am genuinely excited about the Beta.
So, if I ever did decide to retry my luck at building a flavor, distro, fork, etc., it would only use old alpha 4(.1) source and work from there — not any current or recent source to avoid offending the Haiku dev team. Again, they’ve done a great job so far and I respect their efforts.
I’ve internally mused off and on over taking a look at trying again since Poem folded… but I realize that’d require a stack of work, like getting a modern browser, compiler, EFI, etc. on it over time. The other thing is I learned a lot from failing at Poem, more than a chapter out of a book would say. Here’s some advice free of charge to anyone eager to work on a (software) project:
- Don’t be too anxious to plan and announce something. Is it something that needs done or not?
- Be braced for fails. They can happen. I wasn’t ready; I was a cocky kid who failed thanks to no one but myself.
- Never call a build a full 1.0 release without concretely knowing it is one. And don’t be quick to promise one and put up impossible timelines and half-baked junk. (Still learning this one, tbh!)
- Don’t change and redefine the project’s mission, reboot it, split it up, etc. That will self destruct a project faster than an accidental rm.
- Build what you can. Try what you can’t. But let your users know your limits.
Whether I ever dive into the A4 source and make anything out of it ever again or not, be it ‘Haiku Max’, ‘Poem’, ‘Senryu’, or whatever else, I haven’t ‘made up my mind’ as they say…
But I really am hoping to get the word out about the Haiku beta, will post on it whenever it arrives at last, and am excited about it! (And have quick help files to present here soon!)
So that’s my full answer to that. And thanks again for reading, all.
Right, I’d mentioned scalable backgrounds would need to be implemented in addition to size concerns. Which is why a tiled desktop background would be better for this purpose.
No worries; the Dano shade of blue was suggested as a constant, since it’d be a constant color everyone could reference and agree on. Heck, the highlight could be orange, blue, green, etc. but anything would beat drab gray on gray.
Neither do I. Yes, I’ve read the user guide and also have a copy of the BeBook and BeOS Bible. It doesn’t change my opinion that novice users (at least in America) want something ‘quick’ to orient them and won’t browse the user docs on first run.
it says Use the same GCC version as the official distribution (X86 GCC 2.95.3 Hybrid with GCC 4.x alternative GCC libraries)
From what I gather, the GCC requirements appear to be there in order to be certified compatible with Haiku:
For a general (non-certified) distro, I don’t think the system library or gcc2/4 requirements are mandatory. Consider 64-bit Haiku uses v7 now.
Promotional releases must be compiled as a X86 GCC
2.95.3 Hybrid with GCC 4.x alternative GCC libraries,
they must show the following disclaimer in read-only
form after every boot-up, and CDs must additionally be
labeled with that disclaimer: “This promotional demo is
based on unstable alpha Haiku code, and is intended
for developers as a technology preview. This is not the
official Haiku distribution (available at http://haiku-os.org).”
I might want to update this. Replace GCC 4 with GCC 7 [EDIT: or “our latest supported GCC compiler”]. Maybe change “unstable alpha” to either “unstable alpha or beta” or simply “unstable”. First I’ll have to look up how to do website change (“pull”?) requests, since I’ve always ignored it.
1 Like
even then, there is work to make it use gcc 8
great… love this idea
Needs to be adjusted to GCC7.
Honestly it should just be adjusted to current GCC. Then once the R1 release goes out the version number can be put there.
I have yet to see a background that does look really good with tiling. If you have examples, I’d be interested. The other alternative is to create one huge image and “center” it, or align it top-left. But again, I have to see an image where the top-left 800x600 rectangle looks nice as well as the whole image at 3840 × 2160.
Of course we could add images in various resolutions that the user can then pick themselves. But the idea is to have something nice on first bootup without troubling the users. If they have to select some image manually, they’ll probably get one they already use with their other OS.
Ideally, we want to them to stick with a Haiku branded background. Which we don’t have yet…
You may want to put it in a github so people can comment on the latest version and maybe even send pull-requests. You can either join haiku-docs or discuss it here in a separate thread. Some considerations:
- To fit into the rest of the docs, it should use the Haiku-doc.css of the user guide and welcome page.
- Aim for 10 or 12 slides. Anything more will have people feel cheated when they read “Quick Tour”
- Keep every slide very short. No scrolling allowed.
- Link to documents like the user guide for more background. See the screenshot tour’s “Further reading”.
Thanks for the guidelines. Being honest about what I’d hope to do, I’d say…
- I leave whether to follow this spec or not up to the team. (But imho, I believe the tour should use a different template so that it can be free to be true to itself. If it follows the doc guidelines, it’ll also look like a document, which is what I’d like to avoid. I’d let you guys look at it and decide what you think first.)
- Not sure as to its length, but definitely < 20 slides.
- That’s the idea of a quick tour.
- I definitely will put in inline links. But a Redmond-like sidebar or something I’d be reluctant to add to it, unless everyone wants it.
Other thoughts…
As for a Getting Started box like Mint, etc. I do think the “Welcome to Haiku!” (or FirstBootPrompt) serves this purpose really well.
But somehow, the tour would need visibility either with a Quick Tour button here or present itself upon first run. macOS does it best by pushing a “New to macOS?” and/or “See what’s new” notification(s), so that the user can ignore or dismiss them unobtrusively.
If Haiku can mimic doing it this way, maybe the quick tour could open on first run (maybe have it run a check for the absence/presence of a temp file like Mac OS does with Setup Assistant).
But whatever Haiku decides to do with it, if my ‘quick help’ idea is going to be a Quick Tour like Palm, etc. with navigable slides, then there’s no need for me to write ‘basic help’ alongside the user docs, hopefully. The post by @extrowerk mentioning me doing more stuff alongside the existing ones being redundant is totally true in that case:
So, I’ll just work on the Quick Tour idea, then, and also a tiled wallpaper, and submit that when I’m done with both for the consideration of the Haiku team. Once again, thanks for all the feedback, advice, etc. on all this and for reading my post.
(P. S. Still hoping Haiku finds an accent color that works for it, blue or not.)
1 Like
Thats the right way. Try it by yourself and if people like them it could be find a way into haiku.
I do an example “Fist steps” for Haiku like Linux distris have: http://software.besly.de. Here i
show the new user the haiku specific things.
Soem people says it would be good to have something like this as html and not as program.
I thought having the Haiku logo at one particular Golden Mean location with that special shade of blue for desktop colour was Haiku’s equivalent of default wallpaper? I especially liked how it would, on first boot, set the position correctly for the size & shape of the monitor.Or do I misremember?
I’d like to see a button in prefs that sets an image at a Golden Mean location. I dismayed myself sometimes by trying to reset to default after using a different wallpaper, or after changing to a different monitor and the default image is left in a wrong location.
I think you misremember…
If I remember correctly, the default Haiku logo is a small image set to a manual location (X/Y coordinates). Those coordinates don’t change with the resolution, so it very well might be at a golden ratio by accident.
The higher your resolution the further it’ll appear to the top left.
Not sure how close how we are to the rc, but I am hoping to get the tiled wallpaper and tour done by the beginning of this next week and submit it. Just wanted to let everyone know how that was going. I’m hoping it is okay to use the Haiku logos in this case, since this is designed to be (hopefully) be an addition to Haiku.