Why Vistas Theme Support Sucks

While writing applications for  windows, I noticed this about Vista's themes. You have only two options ... no theme support or the Vista theme. The problem is the Vista theme is all just a bunch of grey. At least in XP you could change from silver to blue/olive/royal.



Thank you MS design department for the locking down Vista to one blandly sterile theme and no "official" way to change it!

sysrpl wrote:

While writing applications for  windows, I noticed this about Vista's themes. You have only two options ... no theme support or the Vista theme. The problem is the Vista theme is all just a bunch of grey. At least in XP you could change from silver to blue/olive/royal.



Thank you MS design department for the locking down Vista to one blandly sterile theme and no "official" way to change it!

Nothing Stardock can help with?

I agree, it does look awful especially in FF compared to what FF looks like running on XP.

I was hoping they would port the XP theme over to Vista, but sadly, only Vista basic, and Classic.

Ray6 wrote:



Nothing Stardock can help with?

Stardock and other eye candy programs seem to hog resources.

mcampbell wrote:

I agree, it does look awful especially in FF compared to what FF looks like running on XP.

I was hoping they would port the XP theme over to Vista, but sadly, only Vista basic, and Classic.

Compare with OS X where you get hardly any visual customization (the graphite/aqua thing only introduces minimal changes).

I think Microsoft wants to introduce more visual consistency within Windows, whilst on the whole this is fine, it's going to mean more programs have hardcoded colours and otherwise look utter crap elsewhere.

Examples: Creative Suite 3 (all the main apps: Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc ignore almost all system colors now; Acrobat is the worst offender, then Photoshop).

Office 2007 is on my hitlist too. Office 2003 was great, since it looked even better when using custom color schemes, but with Office 2007 you've got a choice of: Baby-Blue 'n' orange, Battleship grey and orange, or Black and yellow (which is pretty fugly, maybe if it was black and orange).

mcampbell wrote:

Ray6 wrote:  Nothing Stardock can help with?

Stardock and other eye candy programs seem to hog resources.

And fry your computer. Stardock's BootXP messed with my display drivers and sent a bad DCC/DCI signal down my monitor cable, frying my CRT.

If you code in XAML cant you do things custom?

A lot of vista toolbars arent grey though, so non xaml programmers should be able to shift colors too i think

brian.shapiro wrote:

If you code in XAML cant you do things custom?

Bad idea. You want apps to respect system colour settings. Or do you want to return to the days where pre-Windows 95 apps were hardcoded white when ran under 95's grey theme?

W3bbo wrote:



brian.shapiro wrote: If you code in XAML cant you do things custom?

Bad idea. You want apps to respect system colour settings. Or do you want to return to the days where pre-Windows 95 apps were hardcoded white when ran under 95's grey theme?

Generally you do, but its possible to be a little variant and still fit in with the system theme. -- Like inheriting most of the system settings, but on one or two UI elements make it modified

mcampbell wrote:

Stardock and other eye candy programs seem to hog resources.

Something like WindowBlinds 6 barely uses any resources, especially with Vista.