Design

Pretty Widgets, Part 2

Kevin 49 Comments

widgets2.png

Here’s a followup on my attempt to make the HTML widgets on Mac Firefox presentable. I’ve had to make some compromises here to get the widgets to look nice, for instance I force the background-color and -image on buttons. And text box borders usually use my colors rather than the ones specified by the web page CSS. For these reasons these styles would probably not be acceptable for inclusion in Firefox, but in most cases I’ve found these to be more comfortable than the primitive default widgets.

Instructions: Close Firefox. Right-click on your Firefox application, choose “Show Package Contents”, and then open the Contents > MacOS > res folder. Make a backup copy of your platform-forms.css file. Then copy these files into the res folder:

Important: If you followed my instructions in the previous blog post to modify your userContent.css file, either delete it or remove my additional code before trying out the new and improved widgets.

A little bug: I’m not sure how I can get rid of the black border around the inside of the selected select box. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions for improvements!

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Pretty Widgets

Kevin 46 Comments

Inspired by Jon’s attempt to make Mac Firefox HTML form widgets a little easier on the eyes, I’ve taken a shot at making a set of widget styles that blends with Mac Firefox. It has focus rings too!

widgets.png

Instructions: Download the userContent.css file and copy it to your ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/(profile name)/chrome folder. Or add the code within to your existing userContent.css file. It’ll look best on a recent Firefox branch build.

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The Browser, Redesigned: Take Two (or 0.2)

Stephen Horlander 60 Comments

 
winstripe 0.2 toolbar

[ This post is by Stephen Horlander, the designer behind the majority of the Firefox icons. – Kevin ]

After the release of “Winstripe” into the wild there was a large and varied response. Ranging from mindless petulant rants and demands, to well thought out critiques. Lets just say there were more of the former than the latter. Even before it’s inclusion in Firefox I was personally less than thrilled about how it turned out. The idea, as you may have read, was to take the icons from Pinstripe and make them fit into a Windows environment. The theory was sound as the icon concepts used in Pinstripe were, I feel, fairly strong. Due to time constraints and my own admittedly limited familiarity with more recent incarnations of Windows I think they failed on this count. They do however work well enough and are a good deal better than most of the icons used by many Windows applications, in my biased opinion anyway : )

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From the lab: Pinstripe theme tab redesign

Kevin 19 Comments

After seeing Panther’s new tab controls, I thought it was time to redesign Pinstripe’s browser tabs. I want to make the tabs less visually disturbing than the Aqua tabs while being usable and polished. Here’s what I have so far. Click on the thumbnail below to view the whole image. Please comment on the design and suggest changes. Bonus points if you create a mockup of how you think it should look!

P.S.: The screenshot is of the beta of Pinstripe 3 on Mozilla Firebird with the SmoothStripes theme. I don’t use OS themes myself but I plan to make the next version of Pinstripe more theme-friendly.

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