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Old 12-05-2019, 03:57 PM   #117
DeathByGuitar
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Greensboro, NC
Posts: 507
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lerian View Post
I don't want to offend anyone but it looks like the reaper default theme is going from bad to worse. With some tweaks v4 is still is the most usable and easy on the eyes theme i use, hopefully it will be supported further.

Some things are a nice addition but it looks like even though some intentions were good, the implementation looks and feels unfinished and not really thought out from the UX point of view. I mean, nowadays all the major daws focus a lot on usability and how the interface meets the needs of the user and i really feel disappointed. Blending flat elements with skeuomorphism, lack of balance, throwing buttons and color around like in a circus are the opposite of inspiring - actually its straight out ugly.

Being a theme tweaker myself back in the days, i found it very frustrating to make it look better because walter is far from being designer friendly and even lacks proper documentation. Looking at v6 rtconfig.txt i was instantly repelled, and looking for some docs to make sense of it haven't found any to properly guide me to adapt my old v4 theme to the v6 functionality. And instead of focusing on design, i accumulate frustration trying to understand what is what and where it goes.

It really boggles me why the focus on some gimmicks that could be added via a plugin (color schemes to name just one) and the lack of focus on some really useful and asked for settings like theming all the windows of reaper and vector support (!) to make theme development faster and easier and the users happy - scaling it on individual preference.

I'm afraid that until designers will be encouraged with a, say, a more css-like walter, proper documentation, vector support, full theming and full scaling, or maybe a (yeah, i know im way far off) theme development proggie that automatically writes the walter code.. reaper will look and feel unfinished and unappealing (as even the best themes do).

Unfortunately with v6 i felt that reaper is going somewhere not that nice.I hope im wrong but after installing and playing a bit with it i uninstalled it and went back to 5.99 because v6 felt sluggish and slow compared to v5. I even did some tests and the same project in v6 used almost double the CPU and 35-50% more ram. And in the changelog it says performance improvements and less heavy on resources? I don't know.. looks like something is not quite right here.

So back to my handmade v4 mod, and hoping for a better future.


Default 4 Analog was by far my favorite Reaper theme. Basically perfect. How much money would I have to give you to adapt it to R6?
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