Quirks Of Object Bar...

Ok, the Reason why I am posting this is two fold...

One being to explain why/how I did my theme menu's they way I did, and to also explain so unfortunate limitations of objectbar.

Well to begin with I wanted to create a single theme that could use multiple skins... instead of say 14 different seperate themes (this would have taken forever).

Sure this would have solved having seperate Apple color logos for each color theme, if I had done single themes for skin. But that was just way to time consuming to make 180+ BMP's for each skin. One for normal state, One for selected state times each actual menu item that is a BMP which is around 90. The way I took has half the BMP's and they are used across all themes. I took what was less headache.

Now onto fonts well this is a catch 22...

The problem is this... Objectbar was made at a time when there was NO windows XP, and NO such thing as Cleartype.

Now I know I will probally get crap for this, but you should NOT use Cleartype with Objectbar. Reason being you get the problem I have seen most people comment on, that the text and the BMP's with text don't match. Turn off Cleartype and it looks correct... Also Cleartype is supposed to ONLY be used with LCD's, not on CRT's (regular monitor).

Cleartype is not a true Anti-Aliased edge its overcompensating for the pixel resolution of LCD's. On CRT's this actually makes type more blurred than it should be, hence I don't use it. Also win9x and 2000 do not use Cleartype... so for a wider group of users, my method for doing it the way I did it is correct.

And here is the other problem... BMP's can't do an Anti-Aliased edge on type and be transperent, as the following example will show...

Example A. shows how the transperancy overlay works in my theme. Everything thats magenta becomes transperent.

Example B. Shows what happens when you try to use anti-aliased type in photoshop the part that is the anti-aliased edge of the font on the magenta actually makes it darker than the magenta used. Thus causing a pinkish edge to show up around the type... not pretty.

Example C. Now this is what would happen if Stardock added the choice of also using PNG's. You could have a true transperancy or alpha channel... then this would never be a problem... (I posted this request on Stardock's MSG Board.)

Sure I could have done the 180 BMP's with the anti-aliased text on both the menu background and the selected background, but then we go back to the first part of this post... its way too time consuming, also it would then look funny on 9x, 2000, and XP with Cleartype off. Catch 22.

[EDIT]

Oh another solution I thought of is if Objectbar allowed normal text that shows on menus to exist while a BMP is being used (much like TEXT and ICON, choice), and thus the text would show through the transparency of the BMP. This would be a damn good solution, that would fix the use/non use of Cleartype, cause, no matter what the font is, it would be the same for everything. Even with PNG's being used, I would still have to make 2 versions. A Cleartype friendly, and a non Cleartype friendly version.

[EDIT]

I found a solution to having different colored Apples for each skin, it was right under my nose