Desktop Themes v1.0 (c) 1996 Jonathan Potter Left Side Software ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This program is distributed under the Shareware concept. If you like and use this program, please send $US15/$AUD20 to : Left Side Software PO Box 289, Goodwood South Australia, AUSTRALIA 5034 International bank drafts or cash ONLY please! No personal cheques (except from within Australia) please. You can send also credit card information to sales@lss.com.au. Your contribution will help fund the further development of this and other great software. You will be given priority when asking for technical support, and also receive notifcation of new releases of this and other software. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction The Plus! pack for Windows 95 adds many additional features to Windows - some things that really should have been included with Windows 95 itself. One of these is Desktop Themes. A Theme is a collection of sounds, icons, pointers (cursors), along with wallpaper, colour and font settings and a screensaver. Basically, it's all the things about the Windows interface you can configure through the Control Panel, brought together into one package. There are literally hundreds of Themes available, and until now you needed the Plus! pack to use them. Without it, it was necessary to install all the components manually, a difficult and time-consuming process. Then, if you didn't like the finished product, you had to manually change all your settings back again. The Desktop Themes application is a direct replacement for the Desktop Themes control panel provided with the Plus! pack. It offers the same functionality as the Plus! version with a few additional features. Even if you have Plus! you might want to consider switching to using Desktop Themes for the additional features. 2. About Themes A Theme is described by a .theme file, which is basically a .INI file containing all the settings for that particular theme. Desktop Themes can read this file and make all the necessary configuration changes in one hit. You can find hundreds of themes on the net. Some good places to start looking are: Dale's Windows95 Themes Page http://www.bitshop.com/~dale/ Windows95.com http://www.windows95.com/apps/desktop.html Gionet's Win95 Plus Themes http://www.95themes.com/ Spike's Windows 95 Themes Page http://www.algonet.se/~spike/ 3. Installation No special installation is necessary to run Desktop Themes - simply copy the .EXE to wherever you want to keep it (eg C:\Program Files). You can then create a shortcut to it and put this on your Desktop, in your Start menu, etc. The first time you run Desktop Themes, it looks to see if Plus! themes have already been installed on your system. If they haven't, a dialog appears prompting you to create a directory to store themes in. This is necessary for the proper functioning of the program. The theme path defaults to "c:\Program Files\Plus!\Themes", because this is what Plus! itself uses. If you ever install Plus! in the future, the themes you currently have installed should work with no input from you. You can, however, store the themes anywhere you like. Desktop Themes also adds two items to the context menu for Theme files - Apply Settings, and Install Theme. Once these is installed, you can apply a theme instantly by right-clicking on it and choosing Apply Settings (or by double-clicking on its icon). You can install a theme by right-clicking on it and choosing Install Theme. Themes that you install with Desktop Themes can automatically be uninstalled, either using Desktop Themes, or with the Add & Remove Programs control panel. For this to work, the Desktop Themes executable must remain in the place it was when it was first run. That is, you should copy it to its 'final resting place' before running it for the first time. If you move the Desktop Themes executable after it has installed itself, you can update the context menus by clicking the 'Update' button on the Miscellaneous page. However, any themes you have installed will no longer be uninstallable from Add & Remove Progrems (uninstalling them through Desktop Themes will still work). If you have previously installed the 'Theme Installer' application by the same author, you should remove this (by double-clicking on its icon again). Desktop Themes completely replaces Theme Installer as the installer/uninstaller for themes. 4. Usage Start the Desktop Themes app by double-clicking on its icon. A dialog will appear containing several pages, the first of which allows you to select a theme from those installed. A drop-down list is used to choose a theme. The initial selection is "(current settings)" which refers to the current configuration of your desktop. Immediately below this in the list is "(original settings)", which refers to the configuration when Desktop Themes was run (to start with, the current and the original settings are the same). You can always return to the original settings using this selection, which allows you to undo any changes you have made (as the Cancel button does not undo the effects of pressing Apply). The "Save As" button allows you to save the current settings to a new theme. You can use this to preserve your configuration before you start playing with new ones. You can also use it to create themes to distribute to other people. The "Active Components" list allows you to choose which components in the currently loaded theme will be installed in your system when you choose Apply or Ok. By default they are all switched on, meaning that a new theme will totally overwrite your existing settings. You can selectively disable parts of the theme through these switches. To look at a new theme you have downloaded, you must first unzip it and install it. See the next section for information about this. Of the other pages in this dialog, "Display", "Sounds" and "Pointers" allow you to see or hear the various components of the theme before installing it. Each page contains a list of components - for the graphical ones, just click on its name to display it. To hear a sound, select the appropriate sound by name and click the play button. The "Miscellaneous" page contains several additional options that Plus! provides. Some of these might not work on a standard Windows 95 system, but feel free to play around with them. The "Stretch desktop wallpaper to fit the page" feature is emulated by Desktop Themes, but some of the others seem to require Plus! to work. This page also has a field labelled "Path to Themes". You can use this to modify the path that themes are stored in. If you enter a directory that does not exist, it will be created automatically. The "Install" page is discussed in the next section. The "About" page displays some information about the program and the author. 5. Installing Themes The "Install" page allows you to install a new theme. Themes are usually distributed in ZIP format, so you must unzip the theme to a temporary directory. You MUST use a ZIP program that supports long filenames (like WinZip). Once you have done this, you must enter the full name of the .theme file in the Install page. Use the Browse button to help you find it. Themes that have been installed with Desktop Themes can also be uninstalled automatically. To uninstall a theme, select it in the list and click the Uninstall button. You can also uninstall themes via the Add & Remove Progrems control panel. Some third-party themes are not constructed correctly. The .theme file which contains the references to the theme components uses a notation that allows non-specific path names for components. For example, it can specify : %themedir%MyTheme\MyComputer.ico instead of c:\Program Files\Plus!\Themes\MyTheme\MyComputer.ico This means that wherever your themes directory is on your system, the theme will still be able to find its components. Some themes do not use the %themedir% notation - instead, they use absolute paths to theme components, often paths on the theme author's own system. You might see something like : d:\work\mytheme\MyComputer.ico This is plainly not going to work on any computer other than the theme author's. A future version of Desktop Themes will try to get around this problem. For the mean time, themes that are not constructed correctly will not work. 6. Wallpaper Notes Support for JPEG Wallpaper files in Desktop Themes is implemented by converting the JPEG to a temporary BMP file. If you Apply a theme that uses a JPEG for wallpaper, the picture is converted to a permanent BMP file in your Windows directory. This file is overwritten each time you Apply a theme that uses JPEGs, so you only ever have the one converted picture. Since BMP files take much more room than JPEGs, you should ensure you have enough space on your Windows drive (approximately 3mb is required for an average size 24bit picture). This is the same mechanism as Plus! uses. The JPEG conversion itself requires about 1mb of memory - if a wallpaper isn't appearing, and it's a JPEG file, then you probably do not have enough memory. In this case, try closing some open applications and try again. Desktop Themes also emulates the Wallpaper stretching that Plus! performs. This is very useful as it allows you to use practically any size bitmap to fill your screen, instead of leaving an ugly border around the outside. Unfortunately, Desktop Themes' stretching isn't as transparent as Plus!'s is; it has to convert the original size image to a BMP file in your Windows directory (much like the JPEG conversion - of course if you are stretching a JPEG file you only get the one BMP!). This can take a bit of time, and requires some hard drive space. It generally works very well though. Because stretching is implemented via a converted BMP file, if you change screen resolution the stretched image will no longer be the correct size. To remedy this, run Desktop Themes and select the Miscellaneous tab. Turn off 'Stretch wallpaper to fit the screen' and click the Apply button. Then turn it back on and click the Apply button again. You will also have to do this if you change Wallpaper through the Display Properties, and want to stretch it to full screen. 7. Other Notes Desktop Themes allows you to undo any changes you have Applied, unlike the original Plus! control. Use the "(original settings)" item in the theme selection list to return to the settings you had when you ran Desktop Themes. If you have Plus! installed when you run Desktop Themes, it won't install itself in the registry as the default theme handler. If you decide you want to switch to using Desktop Themes, just go to the "Miscellaneous" page and click the "Update" button. This will force it to install itself as the default handler, overrinding Plus!. 8. Uninstalling To uninstall the Desktop Themes application, simply delete the file. To uninstall themes themselves, use either the "Install" page of Desktop Themes, or the Add & Remove Programs control panel. 9. Future Enhancements In future versions I plan to add the ability to configure the various theme components, thus providing a fully integrated editing/previewing interface. 10. Copyrights Desktop Themes is (c) 1996 by Jonathan Potter / Left Side Software. Based on Desktop Themes in Microsoft Plus! (c) Microsoft Corp. Uses The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software (v6a)