buzz forums

I am spying on this xaml theme topic and i do not like it.

I know every one will care a lot... but i feel that i must tell you what i think about xaml buzz theme topic...

I think its some kind of negative developement in buzz
Sure the themes look great and awesome, but there is no clear and full tutorial on buzz themes and xaml, every where is a snipet and this topic is the most useful on that, just because the link to this Kaxaml tool.
The rest of information seems to be very fragmented and to new users the whole skin/theme process seems to be mysterious.
The old buzz themes.col files, in the other hand, were easy to understand, also to non-programmers.
I think the old themes were more animating to do them while the xaml themes are scaring people (as me) away from thinking a lot about new themes.
I think the creation process of themes should be more transparent to endusers, its only logical that a easy skining process will return more awesome skins for buzz.

To put the skining process into the hands of simple endusers there should exist some tool lke the old CyanWerks CyanBuzzTheme 1.5 tool. This tool had a preview window with different buzz gui elements in different states, like LED on/off, Mute/Unmute, Effect/Generator and so on and a color chooser. It was simle and it was fun to make skins, but today it is rocketscience.
If it has to be grafical picture stuff, i also remember winamp skins with the picture and mask and the magenta background, there you could use a template picture and draw all elements and then put it into winamp, so there you had to draw some stuff, but yeah it was userfriendly.

But if it comes to xaml, i read some postings in some topics here, and the most secured information i can assembe from all the postings is, it is not easy, replace this and that but not that and fix this and do not touch that, copy snipet or not, here is the tool, how can we, ... this is all i get beside of the kaxml tool link.

yeah now i have to live with the skins i get, and i hope there will come out some sort of, buzz skinner for endusers 0.1 .exe.
This are my thoghts on xaml
I had to say it...

... but thanks so far for buzz and the ool machines

call me crazy, but i think any time spent on making buzz "themable" is time wasted not making clear decisions on how to make ONE good default UI / theme.



sorry but "simple endusers" will never make a good ui / theme and keep it up to date as development continues and new features are added, things change etc. Most of the themes that exist are horribly outdated already and frankly no good anyway. It's complicated not because of xaml, but because good design is a challenge. Simple things like .col files are obviously limited to change a few colors, but that's not really what makes or breaks a good UI. With xaml you can change a lot of things including the layout of stuff and in some cases even behaviour, of course its going to be a little more complicated, but honestly, for what it does, its as simple as it gets... i just dont think these responsabilities should be shifted to the users just because the default somewhat sucks, thats kind of a cheap cop out, but i also want to say that i care far more about how buzz sounds than how it looks

May you misunderstud me, i like the *.col files, i mostly do not like it bright.
Just the panel and may the toolbar colors and the new sequencer is bright because i cant touch them with a *.col file.

so basicaly i am not asking for a fancy UFO ui just access to some more colors would be nice.
if who ever does this xaml ui thing, it would be cool if there is one picture as a template to repaint it, the old winamp skin is a good example, one picture with all buttons and ui stuff on a magenta background, users were able to redraw the template in just one picture, the whole skin in one file.
This should not change any behaviour at all if i am not totaly wrong.
Users would be able to quckly customize a bit more than just with a *.col. the ui as such is of course overhelming and it should stay better in the hands of the experts, but once such a ui stands it would be nice to get some access to the colors, just some modern options more in the col file at least;)

Just open SequenceEditor.xaml and look at it. Seriously.

Most of the color values are right there, front and center and well labeled (ex: SeqEdBackgroundBrush). Change a few colors. Trial and error till you get it how you like it. No crazy programming language knowledge required for basic stuff like that.

Not only that, but one could take a little incentive and instead of just simply changing the RGB values you can change them to Color="{Binding Buzz.ThemeColors[SE Something]}" .. then in the .col file, add that value like the others. That way in the future you can just edit your themes' col file to make some changes.

btw, to reload your theme while editing, change to the default and back to yours.

(Also, there are absolutely ZERO negatives to oskari exposing the xaml interface to us outside of the binaries and there are thousands of positives..imo, that was a crazy statement to make without knowledge on the subject).

Example colors to change, highlighted (there are a few more at the bottom of the file under "PatternColors" for the pattern block colors):
(your SequenceEditor.xaml file might look a bit different, but its all in principal the same)

Thanks Mute!!

awesome technics you describe

Any touchscreen-friendly theme around, with bigger icons/buttons?

Is it also possible to make the machine parameters vertical? The labels might take up far more space horizontally, but it feels more natural for me to move the sliders up/down than left/right, which would come in handy when using the recording function.

So, now that Buzzmachines is down (probably for good ) where's the best place to find themes?