And here another theme update. The US Memorial Holiday gave me a chance to do a couple of things. One was complete some massive updates to Inanis Seven, and the other was to remember those who have risked and given their lives to keep my people free. Don’t worry, no jingoism here, just simple respect. Everyone, no matter the nationality or political position, should take a moment sometime during the year to remember those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for whatever cause they were fighting. Well, unless they were Nazis… and actually signed up because they wanted to exterminate an entire race… stupid Nazis.
Anywho, back to lighter things. As you can see, Inanis Seven is nearing completion. Many many bugs have been fixed, lots of cool things changed under the hood, plenty of pretty new styling, lighter weight on the ol’ bandwidth (less of those stupid “windows” to load, eh?) and, I think, it’s easier to use. I have it loaded up here on the ‘blog and on my devel sandbox. Play around, let me know what you think.
Oh, and by the way, if anyone is listening, now is the time for feature requests. Anything missing from previous versions you’d like to see. Some major bug you hated and can demonstrate to me? Drop me a line in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.
-I-
Nice post. Well… one thing I like in Seven is the automatic changes of backgrounds, but it would requires a bit more bandwidth… so I don’t know if its really a good idea. But I like the idea of “tray icons” and something with the “right button” btw, it’s excellent this way…. er… When it will be able to download? :D~
Thanks for your input. There is a hidden “tray icons” feature in the alpha code right now, but I’ve yet to do anything with it. I have no idea what I’m going to put there. User generated links? RSS feeds? A 5-speed blender? Who knows? Do you have any ideas what I could put there?
Automatic background changes. Hmm, neat idea. I just might toy around with that one. Wouldn’t be any worse on bandwidth, and fairly easy to implement using cookies and some PHP/JavaScript code. *gears spinning*
“Right Button” – do you mean the right click on the mouse? If so, what would I put there? I can’t think of anything useful – it would mostly be fluff/bloat. Sure, it would look neat but would it serve a purpose?
It will be available for download when it’s done. I have no idea when that is, but we are closer now than we were before. A month, maybe? Don’t hold me to that estimate.
For “tray icons” maybe social icons… as facebook, orkut, linked-in or RSS feeds! But it would be nice if it could be managed by widgets… but edit directly the code wd be fine too!
About the right button, yes I meant the click of the mouse… beyond the look of the contextmenu inspired in the theme, the menu could have some direct links to the main blog pages, like “Contact,” “about me”, etc … and if clicked over the post area, the “permanlinks”, “comments” could be added.
Just an idea, just like the bg changes… but yeah, it is superfluous hehe
I’m looking forward for the release. *grin*
Best regards.
I did think about putting social/RSS buttons in there, but they would be difficult to manage. Putting links to the blog’s own RSS feeds would be nice, but they are already implemented in the “Orb Menu”, as I call it. Otherwise, widgetizing that area would be easy for the blog admin to administer the content, but there’s no way to make sure that the content they throw in there is going to fit within the space. I might be able to write a widget that comes with the theme that the blog admin can use to pop as many buttons in there as he wants, but I’d have to figure out how to write a blog included widget – I’ve never done that before. On the other hand, I can create, on the options page, pairs of Icon/URL options that would show one button for each pair, but because of the limitations of the options system in WordPress, I would have to limit the number of icons to some arbitrary number, like 4 for example. Good ideas, thanks!
The right context menu is a neat idea, but superfluous, like you said. Everything I could put in there can be accessed via other more obvious ways. It would really just add bloat without adding any new functionality.
Nice one. I have an idea, it is about Aero Peek, the one that “peeks” at the window where your cursor is and make others transparent. It would be nice having a button to make all things (include the black right side bar) transparent except the taskbar.
Oh, I am sorry, I forgot about the explorer bar on the left hand side. It will be great if it is adjustable.
About the background, stretching the image filling the screen would be nicer than looping it (an option in the config file to make it whether loop or stretch?).
And the explorer bar I mentioned earlier, I mean it is adjustable by the user (just like Maximize, Minimize features,…) and there should be options in the config file for Aero Peek, Explorer Bar too.
Next is about the taskbar.
In Windows 7, you can use small icons just like Vista or earlier verions too. A button to turn between large small icons would be nice.
Each tab on the taskbar should have an icon right before the name. There should be 1 icon set (for large-small and highlighted when rolling over) for each tab (webmasters can change the icon sets easily).
In Windows 7, the highlighted color of each tab on the taskbar depends on the color of its’ icon. Option to change each tab’s highlighted color would be great.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
Having Aero Peek would be really neat to implement, but it would be purely eye-candy. It would have no real purpose, and would probably bloat the code a bit. Maybe if I was a really good programmer and could present a separate “window” for each page/category button, and then load that content with Ajax so the page doesn’t “reload” blowing away the windows in the process, then we would have a reason to have Peek, because then you would have lots of things to hide and show – but I’m really not that good and it would probably take me another 3 months to implement it, poorly I might add. Anyways, if you can suggest a specific purpose for Aero Peek, I might look into implementing it.
Background stretching is something I had already planned to implement and its in my to-do list to tinker and poke. It’s harder than it seems, apparently, because you have to “fudge” it for different browsers.
(As a somewhat related aside – the configuration file is gone. All options are now implemented using a configuration page from the admin dashboard.)
On the Explorer Bar – I’m a geek and work with Windows every day and even I don’t know what you’re referring to. I even Google Searched it and couldn’t find a reference to that phrase. The closest thing I can understand that you are referring to is the Folder Band, which isn’t implemented anyway. Can you explain in more detail what you mean, possibly with a screenshot?
Putting icons on the Task Bar is something I’ve wanted to do since the first version of Inanis Glass, but it’s a difficult decision to make on how to implement it. I really don’t have any easy way to define what icon the theme should show for any particular Task Bar button. Should it be manually defined by the user? Should we use a custom page field? What about Categories? Categories don’t have custom fields, so we can’t do that. Basically, there’s no easy way for the blog owner to define to the theme what icon to use. If WordPress had something like the Post Thumbnails feature (new in 2.9) that worked on Categories too, then you’d be all set; the blog owner could just set the Post/Category thumbnail, and the theme could pull a smaller version of that as the icon. Heck, with that we could even put icons on the “Live Taskbar Preview” (or menu hover kids, as I call them in the theme code) and icons on the top left corner of the Title Bar.
Don’t even get me started on “make the glow the same color as the icon” thing. I totally want to do that too, but there is no way to do that automatically in a reliable fashion. Windows does this using binary screen buffer magic to do pixel math on the icon and determine the average color of the icon (trust me, I looked it up). The only way I could even imagine doing that is with HTML5′s element to grab a “screenshot” of the icon space and do some math on that, but JavaScript math is horribly slow, and support for that is almost non-extant at the moment – and I have no idea how to use .
With all of that said, I love your suggestions, but I don’t think most of them can be implemented. I will keep them in mind, and if I can find a need for them or a way to implement them, I’ll consider working on them.
hehe I think you have a lot of work yet… but yesterday I was playing trying to put some pages with a specific theme-style… I did! But it would be nice if it was an option that you could choose a theme-style for that page when you are creating it. It would help, if it is possible. :) http://ig.fshark.com
Interesting thought. I’ll look into that.
Thank you for replying.
1. About Aero Peek, just a button to make all things transparent (click again to show) is nice. Sometimes you want to see the full background picture too, do you?
2. This is the Explorer Bar that I talked about: http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/893/explorerbar.jpg
3. Yes, when I mention icons and colors, I meaned to have user-defined (put/upload an icon and input the color code in hex).
I see what you mean now. I’ll look into it!
You could try this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dtree-30/ ;)
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Hey Inanis, congratulations for your theme. It’s really wonderful!
Where can I find this update, I have installed your previous version, with Vista style. This Seven style is so amazing!
Thanks