I have finished the new built-in palette and given it the name Sparkle. It is inspired by the glassy look of Vista and the color scheme of Windows Media Player 11. However, note that it is inspired by them and not an exact copy. Here are a few more screen shots to augment those in the last post…
(For some reason Paint Shop Pro is not capturing the cursor when it should be, Column3 has the mouse over it to show the hot tracking effect but the mouse has disappeared)
The actual appearance is better than these pictures which are a bit grainy. But it gives you the general idea. Note that this palette is not really intended for boring line of business applications. You already have Office 2007 style palettes for those types of app. This is intended as a bit more funky and for use in utilities or internal apps where you can be a little more daring!
Right, now onto the 2.8.0 bug fest!
May 21st, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Very nice. Did you do the design yourself? Combining an artist and a developer in the same brain is an exercice at which Mother Nature seldom succeeds.
BTW, SnagIt is a great that capture tool (that captures mouse cursors just fine). They even give away their version 7 for free now.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:53 pm
WOW. you will find that users nowadays are used to scintillating colur and I will be using this in my LOB applications as well. I hope you can add tracking to the office 2007 grids in the future as that does really look nice.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Wow, the palette looks a little bit like the Mac-Skin I’m currently on ;)
–> http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/4207/mcskinle4.png
One question Phil:
How will the ContextMenuStrips look like? I can’t manage it to get the ContextMenuStrips look like the KryptonContextMenu (especially the hovered items).
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:41 am
Out of interest Phil, did you use the palette designer for this, or the nitty-gritty rendering in code?
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:53 am
Great work !!
Hope we will see more Palettes/Skins in future.
Maybe a new Forum Section for Custom Skins brings more like this to the surface.
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:27 am
Hello Phil,
Is it possible, in Krypton Toolkit 2.8.0, to apply a palette to the original TabControl or GroupBox, or I’ve to write a custome control?
Thanks
Alb.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Wow, looks amazing, Phil!
I had actually tried (unsuccessfully) to reproduce the Windows Media Player scheme using the Palette tool a few months back.
But I see you did something amazing here and have blown us away as always with a beautiful rendering job again. Great job man! Thanks for this new palette.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Serge Wautier: I do not have a designer to do this for me, unfortunately. That is why I copy existing color schemes and do not try to make up new ones. It seems that 64bit Vista is why Paint Shop Pro does not include the cursor in snapshots. I will certainly try SnagIt the next time around.
Waescher: Your palette is looking good. If you can finish it off I will see about including it in a future version of the Toolkit. I didn’t just define a set of colors but also created a renderer for the tool strips to draw exactly the way I wanted. You might need to consider doing the same thing.
Vesuvius: I only used the Palette Designer once I was finished and used it to check the appearance of all items in all states to ensure I had not missed something. Mostly I just altered the code directly because the built-in palettes are provided in code rather than a KryptonPalette instance.
Alberto: No, you cannot apply a KryptonPalette to any non-Krypton controls. Just use teh Navigator and KryptonHeaderGroup instead!
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Hi,
Can you include build-in Windows Live Mail color(s) theme in your toolkit ?
Win Live mail apps looks great and no one offers that color theme in component market yet. You can be the first one to offer that feature!
Is’t great idea?
May 31st, 2008 at 10:17 am
Yeah, I second Hitesh. Anyway, this really is great this new Sparkle theme. Thanks a lot!