Google Reader and Bloglines themes - it's over to you.

(Last Google Reader theme post, I promise)

Before now, I’ve felt quite protective of my site skins, and have always stated “Feel free to modify the CSS to suit your own tastes, but please don’t redistribute”. This stems from vanity to be truthful – I spend a long time creating these themes, and don’t want other people getting the credit!

That was how I used to think though. As time goes on, I feel like I’m becoming more communist open when it comes to the web. Besides, I have little time to update the themes, and carry out feature/bug requests, and they’re both at a point where I’m happy with them. Sure, there’s so much you could do to them, but the original intention was to create something for myself. Which is where you come in.

These themes are now both “do what you like with them”. Take out the bits you don’t like, put in new bits, whatever. Feel free to re-distribute them anywhere you like, whether slightly tweaked or massively altered. They’re yours to do with as you please! Give them a good home and let me know what do with them (hopefully something better!)

downloads

Google Reader Theme
Bloglines Theme for Webkit & Opera
Bloglines Theme for Mozilla

Finally, to answer a much-asked question I don’t have plans to do a GMail or GCal skin, but you never know.

Tags: google, greader, opensource, themes

Google Reader Theme

I’ve been using Flickr as a bit of testbed for a new site theme I’ve been working on for Google Reader. C’mon after the Bloglines thing, I bet you saw it coming didn’t you?!

Same drill again then. There may well be oddness and inconsistencies, and Google may well make radical changes to the Reader’s markup tomorrow, mucking the whole show up. But for what it’s worth, here it is! Its not trying to be original or ‘better’ than the default theme, it’s just trying to make it look like a Mac OS X app – that’s all I want!

Tags: browsers, css, google, googlereader, themes

Omniweb theme 1.2

Since last weeks update, I’ve not only refined the Safari style buttons, but the iTunes style buttons too. These look miles better, so if you’re using the round buttons, please re-download and install.

This will be the last update to the Omniweb theme for a while, but I will be updating my Camino theme with these new icons soonish.

Download the Tiger theme for Omniweb 5.5 (888k)

Tags: browser, omniweb, osx, themes, updates

A new home for Aronnax

Whenever anyone has asked me if I was going to a Firefox theme, I tell them there’s no point. There’s a chap called Aronnax, who has created some beautiful themes that make Firefox feel a whole lot more like a Mac product.

Recently, his site at spymac has been down a lot, so I offered him the Take back the web.org site as something more reliable. I felt it was so important that his themes are as available as possible, as they really make Firefox liveable on a Mac. He’s redesigned too, take a look.

Tags: firefox, themes

Tiger theme for Omniweb

Screenshots

Please note, I am using Nathan Skinner’s Tiger Theme, in these screenshots:

Overview (click for full sized image)

Toolbar (click for full sized image)

Tags: browsers, omniweb, osx, software, themes, tiger

Tiger style for NetNewsWire

Just what the world doesn’t need right now – yet another spotlight style for NetNewsWire – but here it is anyway.

Tags: osx, rss, themes, tiger

Safari tabs for Firefox updated

How to improve the original tabs hack with close buttons.

Tags: browsers, code, firefox, safari, themes

Hicksdesign theme for Omniweb 5

For that <1% of the Hicksdesign readership that use it, here is the Hicksdesign theme for Omniweb 5.

Tags: browsers, omniweb, osx, software, themes

Alternative Sage Toolbar Icon

My previous modifications to the Firefox Toolbar have one problem. Certain extensions’ toolbar icons become borked. This is due to forcing a css priority, unintentionally overriding css rules for these icons.

The fix is simple, the following rules just need to be re-applied in userChrome.css, after the rules for the main toolbar:

 #sage-button {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://sage/skin/sage.png") !important;
}
toolbar[iconsize="small"] #sage-button {
  list-style-image: url("chrome://sage/skin/sage-small.png") !important;
}

So, while I was at it, I created a new toolbar icon for Sage, based on the new RSS Live Bookmarks icon:

Tags: firefox, rss, sage, themes

Safari style tabs for Firefox OS X

As a CSS designer, I’m really enjoying the ‘customisablity’ of Firefox with a language that I understand. I can’t program, but I can do CSS, which it uses to define the look of its interface.

Here’s another little mod for OS X* Firefox users. It emulates an aqua version of Safari’s upside down tabs. I personally love this style, and prefer the more compact size of them compared to Firefox’s default tabs (which are designed to emulate the window title bar).

Tags: firefox, safari, themes

Native (looking) Firefox OS X widgets

(File under ‘obsessive browser theming’)

Following on from the previous post, I’ve made some improvements to the form widgets CSS for OS X. Phillipe pointed out to me how to add background images to <input> tags by setting the border to solid 0px white, and the background colour to transparent. So, buttons, textfields and textareas can now look like this in Firefox:

Tags: firefox, osx, themes, widgets

Tweaking Firefox with CSS

I’ve only recently discovered the power of Mozilla’s ‘user content’ files that reside in the profile directory. I’d created a user.js file to add preferences for things like pipelining, but I’d never looked into the others – ‘userChrome.css’ (for tweaking the interface), and ‘userContent.css’ (for tweaking the web page display).

Here are the tweaks and customisation that I’ve done to my copy of Firefox to give you an idea. First of all, make life easy for yourself and install Chris Neale’s ChromEdit extension. This allows you to edit the user files from within Firefox. Once you’ve restarted, ‘Edit User Files’ will appear under the Tools menu.

Tags: code, css, firefox, themes

RSS sidebar in Safari

Those of you who are registered users of Saft will now have the latest preview version with the new sidebar feature. The plugin nature of the sidebar (each panel can be a web page, perl script or shell script) has got me wondering about what useful little widget I could put in there.

Here’s my first idea. After hacking the excellent Feedonfeeds news aggregator script, I’ve made a little OS X style RSS sidebar. Feedonfeeds is a php/MySQL solution that you can install on your site, rather than using a desktop client. From here I can click the unread number to view the latest feeds, the grey number to see all the recent entries, and the blog name to go straight to the site. The first 2 open in a simplified format – very like the RSS Reader/Sage extension for Firefox, and the upcoming Safari RSS reader.

Tags: code, rss, safari, themes

safari sidebar - beta screenshots (updated)

That’s right. I’ve just received a new Saft beta, with the sidebar that I’ve been bellyaching about for months! To be honest, alhough I pestered Hao for this feature, I never really thought it would be possible, but hey, it never hurts to ask. Hao seems to like a challenge however, and he’s been kind enough to allow me to post screenshots here.

This version works the same as other releases of Saft. The plug-in goes into the Library>InputMangers folder replacing the previous version. Once launched, Safari then has the ‘Show Sidebar’ command in the Safari menu (this is a temporary position).

Tags: plugins, rss, safari, software, themes

Shiira theme

To install this set, all you have to do is go to Shiira’s icon preferences, choose ‘load icons’, and navigate to the ‘ShiiraIcons.plist’ inside the Hickstheme folder. This will load the main toolbar icons. If you want to use plain folder icons to clean up the interface (along with some other improvements), these have to copied manually into > Shiira (ctrl-click to choose ‘show package contents’)> contents> resources>. Just a replacement icon for icon preferences is yet to be done.

Tags: browsers, osx, shiira, themes

Safari menu separators

I’ve come up with a very lo-fi hack for creating bookmark menu separators in Safari. By combining a grey line favicon, with the most minimal page title I could find (unfortunately, Safari doesn’t allow blank titles) you can get a passable separator. If you like the look of example above, simply go to http://sep.hicksdesign.co.uk/, and bookmark it. Once in your bookmarks it can copied into other folders by alt-dragging.

Tags: browsers, howto, safari, themes

updates to the camino theme

I’ve just tweaked my metal theme for Camino to work with Aqua and Panther. It’s essentially the same, but the toolbar icons have been reworked to be brighter and not so heavy around the edges. Its also got a hint of graphite colour just to lift it.

Until the current speed problems with the metal theme and the searchbar are ironed out, I’m using a Panther OS theme from ResExcellence. I’m not normally a fan of these things, but it looks more professional than aqua pinstripes.

Tags: browsers, camino, osx, themes

new camino metal theme!

Finally, I’ve finished (for now) the new theme for camino. Intended for use with a metal interface, it contains new icons, buttons and splash screens for nearly the entire camino set.

Click here for information, previews and download…

Tags: browsers, camino, osx, software, themes

camino buttons

I’ve just uploaded a couple of new buttons to the camino resources page – Open Tab and Close Tab. My intention is to add to this set in the future (maybe even get round to doing a full set?!). I’d like to have a go at things like the popup unblocker icon.

I’ve also updated the Metal theme to work with the recent nightly build – 17th May – which includes the popup unblocker. As new features get introduced into Camino, you will need to check here for a new version (or else those nice new features won’t work!).

Finally, there is an issue of speed when using the metal theme with recent nightlies. If you have the google search in the toolbar, it will be slower to scroll and type inside textfields (can be quite painful actually!). Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about this (and don’t bother Mozilla about it, this is a hack, not part of their original application). This may change as the nightlies change, who knows?

Tags: camino, themes