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Weebly has been an acceptable hoster, but we're moving over to Github pages in the coming weeks. It's easier to work with and is less clunky than the current platform, so we'll start redirecting traffic in about a month.
Project-wise, we're working on GTK4 and making good progress. If all goes well, when that's done we'll start updating individual theme components (shell themes, wm decoration, etc.) and start work on making those easier to manage on our end as well. We have officially dropped support for all B00merang themes, effective immediately, to ease our migration to GTK4. We hope to bring some select ones back when the migration is complete. If you want to have a look at our new website, check it out here: https://b00merang-project.github.io/
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The project is still alive. We haven't had much time to work on it lately, but we want to keep working on this in the short-term future.
We're currently working on adding GTK4 support to the Azurra framework. We've seen the framework used by a few people to create their own themes, and it's always great to see other people using our tools :) Not much else to say, except happy holidays and happy new year.  We changed our logo again, because why not? (Yes, it looks like a terminal icon) Welcome back! We haven't been that active lately. Having started to work in IT, there isn't as much will and time available for coding outside work hours :) However, the modularity of the Azurra framework has really helped us in reducing the amount of time necessary to make changes to a wide range of themes. One example of this is the newly added support for the Xfce4 workspace switcher. In the newest iteration of the reliable desktop environment, our themes were not correctly highlighting the active desktop. Support was finally added, in a surprisingly simple way, by added the required code to the environments modules and recompiling. We've also reworked Xfwm4 themes for macOS themes, added a new one for Windows 7 and added special theming for the Whisker menu to the XP themes and their derivatives. Here's a look at how they look after the changes:  We're now working on finalizing the scripts we use for certain tasks and closing the last remaining issues from our bug tracker, some going as far back as 2018!
We're planning our next step in modular theme generation. We want to make a tool that will make development of Cinnamon and GNOME themes much more easy and flexible. Basing ourselves on the proven Azurra framework toolkit, work on this project will start soon (TM). We also have the idea of creating a script that will be able to generate SVG images from a CSS/SCSS file, and to use that file for KDE theming or other projects. We are still evaluating if it is a viable strategy, but if it is, we may finally achieve our goal of having a modular cross-environment theme development kit. Hopefully we have more news coming soon. Happy 2020 everyone! Hopefully this year we manage to get restore the monthly update blog posts.
Since the last update, the sporaic updates were small corrections to fix minor bugs. But while everyone was having fun and relaxing during the holidays, we found time to finally upgrade our metacity themes! This effectively unifies all of the codebase under a common arc-derived rock-solid foundation. Not only does it simplifies maintenance, it also brings support to all the new bling Metacity 3 brought to the table (think Xfce-like window actions, like pinning, shading/unshading windows...). This also opens the possibility to add themes for themes that otherwise wouldn't bave had that chance. Right now, we're planning on adding metacity themes to Solaris 8-11.4, Human and Windows 1.0/2.0. We also revised all Cinnamon themes. While merging everything under one codebase was not the idea, we managed to patch in some corrections that finally bring the Cinnamon 4.x series under the "supported" desktops category. We apologize for taking 2 years to finally add support for the newest features Cinnamon put on the table with Linux Mint 19.1. While Gnome support was the main target for 2019, it's not acceptable to ignore a platform to prioritize another. Another priority this year is MATE optimization. We haven't fully tested the themes under MATE, and we expect some bugs to show up. We plan on having those squashed by the end of February. Finally, Xfce support will also be under testing to harmonize the experience among the platforms as much as possible. On the creative side, we have nothing planned, and frankly, it's good to stop creating to watch over previous creations. We also doubt we're going to see a new theme soon. Thank you to those of you reading this and thank you for keeping up with us.       This month has just begun and we already have news for you!
New themes:
Details
We also plan on dropping the 'b00merang' prefix of the custom themes. For example, b00merang Glass would simply be renamed 'Glass'. We first have to fix some logistics of renaming the source code repositories, but that should happen sooner than later. Also added new navigation options for the website: by year and by manufacturer. More to come  You did not know you needed it until you got it! Windows 2.0 comes with calculator and reversi! No more boring lunch breaks!
It's time for our monthly update post.
9 new themes joined the lineup. The Azurra maintenance model means some complexity for some kind of updates, but otherwise provides a quick and easy way to generate and maintain A TON of themes without much user input. New themes:
This month saw a huge update cycle for all themes, including some reworks and enhancements that are not that apparent to the user, but facilitate the developer's life a whole lot. For next month, we have two or three themes in the pipeline and probably some more updates. We will also aim to publish all our themes on OpenDesktop for a consistent download experience.  We have made some updates to our website. Some layout, coloring and small content updates as well.
We still have to update some pictures and links, and have yet to publish some themes on OpenDesktop When we first started creating themes, in 2015, GTK was on version 3.14, Ubuntu users were complaining about overlay scrollbars and Windows 10 was just released. At the time, the biggest themes were Numix, Arc and Ambiance variations. To edit a theme, it was enough to change a few colors, redefine some widgets in the CSS file and everything was ready. In fact, the first release of the Windows 10 theme was just a recolour of a Numix variant, flat unity.
In early 2016 GNOME 3.20 was released, and with it big changes. CSS was generated using SASS, the default Adwaita theme had an enormous ruleset and it broke backwards compatibility with earlier themes. At this time, we had generated quite a few themes and as we planned the porting process, we saw some themes would be left behind because porting them all was a big task for a small part-time team. It took 2 years to fully port all themes and the results were not pretty. Some early ports were acceptable but maintaining SASS-generated code was not easy, as that meant lots of redundant or unnecessary rules. At this point, I started thinking of a way to reuse code and generate it using a custom built tool, as I didn't fully understood SASS at the moment. As I like fancy acronyms, I named that tool MTAC (Modular Theme Architecture and Compiler) and had a version for GTK 3.18 and another for 3.20. It worked by pasting together snippets of CSS, allowing for code reusability. However, there was no dynamic loading and code collections were full of symlinks for it to work. TDK (Theme Development Kit) was supposed to replace MTAC by using SASS and removing the need for symlinks, but it never materialised. Fast forward to mid-2018: most themes are 3.20+ compatible but with inconsistencies across all of them which are patchable but require too much time to correct across all themes. And with new themes planned and in development, things were about to get worse. At this time, I was developing a theme using SCSS (B00merang Flat was supposed to, but didn't deliver). Work was complete around October and code separation was done by December. Code separation was the process of separating from the main file all code that was going to be reusable. 2019 was spent porting the themes to this new tool and making adjustments and enhancements along the way. We have some pretty exciting plans for Azurra, which may one day result in you doing a unique theme completely from scratch and from a GUI application. Who knows!  Azurra Framework Today, the B00merang Project releases a major piece in our build infrastructure. The Azurra framework, which has been improved for the past few months is going open-source under the GPL v3. It is available on Github for public usage. For now, it's still in alpha, missing documentation and a definitive set of scripts (the current ones are hotfixes written on the spot), but we will continue to gradually improve it as time goes on. Impovements to the upstream Azurra framework have been merged with our themes code. This brings:
We also added and updated a few themes:
We expect to release the following soon:
What's planned:
We will update the website and download pages in the coming weeks to the newest versions available. We hope you enjoy our themes as much as we enjoy creating them! What is this Azurra framework you might ask? It's our in-house development pack to easily create and maintain themes using SCSS. Now everything's ported, but there's a lot of optimisations to do, so we'll attack thos next.
We also added a couple of themes: - Windows Phone 8.1 Dark - Windows 10 Acrylic (previously Mobile) - Windows 7 (previously Se7en, now has a GTK theme)  What is this theme? So university isn't so bad after all.
The theme we were charged woth making has been shipped, and we recycled the SCSS framework we developped to bring some much needed updates to our theme lineup. As of today, the following themes have been ported to the Azurra framework:
What's new is that the SCSS aspect allows for dynamic linking between themes. For example, all XP themes could share the same file for theming a widget (ex. buttons). When all themes will have been migrated, we're planning on creating a tool for easy theme creation (kind of like oomox). Themes will be updated on opendesktop.org, but we're going to revamp the website soon after. There has been some changes in the direction the project will now be taking.
Also, our lead developer leaves for university, and we're uncertain of his capacity to continue development. Our other developers have also taken their distances from the project. It's not looking good, but we'll try our best to keep this amazing project (at least) up and (hopefully) running. Thanks to all of you for your support.  We're on fire! In the past few weeks, we've added even more themes, pushing our theme count past 50! Here's what new:
Now we will focus on maintaining and fixing some bugs and port B00merang Themes to GTK 3.22, so no new themes planned for the next few months.     Time for the monthly update!
First of all, as many of you noticed, we have released 4 of the 6 themes we promised last year. The iOS 4, Windows 8.1 Metro, Windows Server 2012 and Solaris 11 Nimbus themes are ready to be downloaded! We hope to release the BeOS R5/Haiku and Solaris 10 Blueprint themes in the coming months. Second, we had an intensive update program that aimed to fix bugs and enhance previously released themes to leverage them for the (now released) Ubuntu 18.04 LTS platform. Third, we have bundled Gnome-shell themes to a number of previously Cinnamon-only themes (Windows XP, OS X/Mac OS X, iOS). Last, we're planning on two new themes released with or before the BeOS/Solaris 10 themes. Thanks to all for your support, and see you next month! |
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Elbullazul Archive
February 2023
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