Sure I know vista styles tend to use png images, but I seem to have noticed a potential problem. Unless wine has its own window manager, styles like Windows Aero may look very strange in wine. Reason: Aero is intended to be a unified look and imagine a partial glass look with metacity chopping off part of the theme. Also, how would we know were to start drawing in the aero image resource if we do not have a winewm to use it? I think a winewm needs to be worked on and I would be willing to work on it if needed. That would send desktop integration leaps and bounds forward because you can tell environments like kde, gnome, and xfce to use it.
Vista&7 use a different msstyles format that is not supported. I think transparency shouldn't be a problem, a) because Vista/7 themes themselves contain an opaque version (the bright blue one) + the transparent version can be set to opacity 100%. b) Even now Wine does not draw window frames and titles when you use a XP theme. Drawing window frames is a job of the default window manager and not Wine (not yet to speak of inconsistent behaviour for shortcuts, window buttons etc.) Normally Windows themes don't contain transparent elements inside of the window frames (many pngs, but they don't let the desktop penetrate). Nevertheless proper RGBA and compositing support would be good. I also agree that it's time to increase support for current Windows and Vista&7 themes because they are now around for so long and Microsoft advances so fast.
Fred2 wrote:> > > > If the theme engine can hook into other GUI toolkits externally as well [...] you could make wine apps seamlessly blend in with those on your desktop. > > So that is the way to go! > Any thoughts by wine developers on that? When and how would this be possible? At least for system colors and system icons should be feasible. Hooking GTK into msstyles (for bitmap-styled buttons etc.) is understandably the most challenging and probably above the scope.Metatheme has done the reverse (msstyles in qt and gtk+) so I am sure it can be done, I may try it if I can have a crack at it.