How can I revert the ToolWindow's appearance?

Hi Josh,

Unfortunately we don't have the old styles available in 2011.2. That being said, our Themes QuickStarts show how you can customize individual brushes per theme. You can tweak brushes however you need to alter the look. For our info, what about the new themes is holding you back?

Alright I'll see if I can work my way through customizing one of the themes to look like the old theme.

In development we like the new themes but we have to get buy-in from product management. To change the look of our UI this drastically in a minor release isn't acceptable. We also didn't factor time into our release planning to handle creating custom themes. This is something we assumed wouldn't change and even if it did we expected a simple path to get back to what we had.

This is quite frustrating.

Josh

I'd bet we're not the only customer who isn't happy with this change. It would go a long way if Actipro would supply a custom theme that matches the old theme.

Josh

Hi Josh,

We're certainly open to offering an alternate look if we find that a lot of customers don't like the VS-like higher contrast look. But in order to do that, we first need to know specifically what is disliked. Is it just that the workspace area is too dark? Also, which themes do you use in your app?

You had mentioned your development team liked the look, but you were just waiting to get management approval since it's a large visual change for a small release of yours. While we can possibly do updates in the future to add a lighter look via the customization of brushes, it still wouldn't match the old version's exact appearance since the templates are very different now.

Maybe it's not the theme that's the issue. The biggest change is the docking window title bars and tool bars but the themes don't all affect them.

We used the default theme for the majority of the app and the Office2007Blue theme for a few dialogs. It would be nice if you could at least provide a "how to" post on getting the docking windows back to their original style. If that's going to be hard for Actipro to do imagine how hard it's going to be for us and other customers.

Josh

I agree with Josh on this one, the previous version's look and feel were very similar to the product we are trying to replace (which our users are used to), and I would really like to have that look available to me.
I'm a developer not a designer so I'd prefer not to spend countless hours getting the look that was just the default back.
Marc

ps I think the actipro library is awesome; just like the old colors better.

Hi Josh and Marc,

Thank you for your feedback. Our themes updates in 2011.2 affect colors (brushes) and styles/templates. There are literally hundreds of updates/enhancements made throughout our products for the 2011.2 version.

For us to be able to help with suggestions and/or future enhancements for you, we really need very specific examples of things you are looking to change, such as in a bulleted list.

For instance, Marc, are the tab shapes and layout fine and it's more of you just wanting the colors to be a bit more muted and neutral in general?

Colors mostly, but the default margins between parts seems to be wider and as a result things dont seem to line up as neatly as well.

We've been looking into this and what we're probably going to try and do is make another Themes sample in a future build that shows several Docking variants for some themes. The variants will render with colors similar to how they looked in 2011.1. It won't be exactly the same but will be close and will at least give you some complete full-source examples for achieving that look.

How can I track this feature?

Hi Josh,

We've started into it a bit. We hope to have it ready for the next maintenance release. It may still be 2-3 weeks out though.

Thank you for the update.