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Nov 12, 2014

Skinning windows made better

Some times, it does not matter how much time you spend testing things and trying to fix all issues before a release. Something embarassingly big always eludes controls. This time it happened with Icaros' Theme selector in Prefs. We noticed long ago it wasn't working very well with newer AROS files, but we put it in the 'to-do' list and then we completely forgot about it. Result is that people who wish to change their theme can actually do that, but after many pointless debug windows popping up on the screen, not counting issues with some themes (OS3.1, Special, Mason) which weren't actually themes but simplier AROS system images, and sadly crashed Icaros at reboot when chosen. For this reason, yesterday evening I thought that my daily travel by train, from office to home, would have been better spent by debugging the Theme program in Prefs. I'm not a LUA coder but, as you might have already read in the past, I started learning something about it with the Icaros Setting program. You can appreciate the results in the top left screenshot: it looks exactly like it was before, but now it works as expected. My works on the Theme program also led to a discussion on AROS-EXEC, since themeing needs some lines in the startup-sequence I proposed to change. There are still some minor problems when themes are disabled, but we'll find a solution, some day (it's in our to-do li... ehm...).

PS: if you have an Acer AspireOne ZG5, but even if you haven't any, don't miss this article on Epsilon's Amiga X1000 blog. A great page about Icaros Desktop we couldn't appreciate more.