July Summer news

Source: Pixabay

Not much to say this month. Development has been focused on porting more themes to MTAC (more precisely, Windows 3.x and Windows 9x) and planning our next moves.

​We have decided to fork a new version of Windows 9x and call it Windows Server Classic. Why? Have a look at both of these pictures:

See the color différences? You may think it's not a big deal. Well to us it is! As it has been proved by the subtle color differences between the Homestead and Luna themes, themes otherwise very similar in look and feel, we like to emulate the looks of OSes in the closest way possible. The Server Classic theme will cover a wide array of Windows versions, since it was included in all of these versions:

• Windows XP
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008 and
• Windows 7

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Since Classic & 9x will share almost the entirety of the code, we will have to re-write and re-coulour some assets to ease the portability of elements between both versions.

The new Server Classic will join the new Windows Server 2012 theme into a new sub-class called Windows Server in the Redmond Collection page.

As for our plans, we expect to port all our themes​ to MTAC*. This is due to a more restrictive schedule and because most of the patches applied to macOS or Google themes have to be ported back to MTAC in a time-consuming procedure. Since all three codebases are very similar (we counted less than 20 significant différences), porting them in will be very simple. However, some small changes are not Worth the trouble of creating new nodes in MTAC. So we will add an if syntax​ to the compiler to deal with these small différences in styles. Maybe some nodes may be reintegrated in the code to reduce the maintenance of nodes.

When all themes will be correctly ported to MTAC and all particularities have been restored, we will start development on the new themes you chose. Based on current poll results, this is the order in which we will develop the new themes: 

1. ​Windows 8.1 Metro
2. Windows Server 2012
3. Solaris 11
4. iOS 4
5. BeOS
6. Solaris 10

​Also, some small scripts have been added to the MTAC script pack to easily replace some class instances in all the code.

​This concludes the monthly newscast. Have a nice summer and thanks for using our themes!

​* For newcomers, MTAC (which stands for Modular Theme Architecture and Compiler) is a tool we developed to adapt patches and fixes to a wide array of themes. Think of it as a SASS/SCSS implementation, but using BASH as interpreter instead of a custom complier