******************************************************
*                                                    *
*                   Camaelon v0.1                    *
*                     14/04/03                       *
*                                                    *
*             Theme bundle for GNUstep               *
*                                                    *
******************************************************

Web site
--------

http://www.roard.com/camaelon

This program is released under the GNU Public Licence. 
See the COPYING file for more informations.

Author
------

Nicolas Roard <nicolas@roard.com>

Introduction
------------
The original look of GNUstep is very close (if not exactly similar) to the NeXTSTEP look. 

While very good when you works with it, it looks a bit old with the current playskool interfaces 
available everywhere ... 
So I wrote this theme bundle, Camaelon, with the idea of providing a fresher look, while 
remaining good in term of useability.

Actually it's not very configurable (you need to change values in the source code for gradients/colors), 
but hopefully it will be the case in a near future ;-)

The other point is to provide a basis for themes under GNUstep; while I did some others attempts
(see http://www.roard.com/screenshots), I'm trying here to not provide for the moment a full theme engine 
but rather a more configurable and enjoyable GNUstep base UI. I'll try in the future to improve this 
theme bundle to effectively provide a full theme engine, but this will involve some works on -gui.

Anyway, I think this current theme bundle is already interessting to test ... :-)

Classic Theme
-------------

This is the current look provided by the theme bundle (theme's name : "Classic").

The colors are brighter than the the original GNUstep's look -- it could be a problem if you have a well 
configured gamma on your display... 
The differencies are small but forms a quite refreshing look (switch and radio buttons, sliders, arrows ...).

The biggest "visual" difference are the gradients (mainly on NSTableView, NSOutlineView and NSBrowser headers).

Installation
------------

You need to patch some files in the GNUstep -gui sources. Go in the gui/Source directory of your local GNUstep's sources,
and apply the provided patch file, themes.patch : 
		
		patch -p0 <themes.patch

Then, just compile the Camaelon bundle : 

		make

You should have now a Camaelon.themeEngine bundle. Copy this bundle where you want.

After that, you also need to tell GNUstep where to find the theme bundle, so write : 

		defaults write NSGlobalDomain  GUIThemeBundles "YourLocation"

(with YourLocation the path to Camaelon.themeEngine, included).

Now, just try to run a GNUstep program ... :-)

Problems
--------

There are some problems with GNUstep's widgets which wrongly set their background's colors, and it seems also that 
Gorm files could have some problems (if you use the theme, and save a .gorm, users could have a problem loading 
the theme... I need to investigate that problem).

Future goals
------------

- Provide a better configurability :-) -- with a GUI program to easiliy set themes and themes characteristics 
- Having the themes characteristics and icons separated in another bundle will permits to separate Camaelon with 
  actual themes -- Camaelon will only load the selected theme; So it will be possible to distribute themes easily 
  (with same UI but different icons/color sets) ...
- Clean up -gui problems with wrong color behavior, and ideally update everything to provide a full 
  color/gradient/pattern fill ... and, eventually, provide a full pixmap theme engine.

Contact
-------

You could contact me at this address : nicolas@roard.com 
