Understandable proposition about the default theme and documentation, but also a dangerous one. Default theme is definitely not the one I would base any beginner themeing information on. Not the new one, and not the current v5 either. Anybody who has peeked into rtconfig of those two should realize that soon enough.
First of all, these themes use what WT calls flow. How many of all user themes, except the modified default themes use that and why not? If you are not going to utilize flow, a lot of the theme code in there is useless for you and will just confuse you more.
Those themes do offer guided places and ways to edit the theme somewhat. Inside default v5 theme you'll find lines stating "USER : mess with these:" and then given some variables which are easy enough try out without the need to really understand how you build themes. With v6 users even get a script with which they can adjust some of the theme elements. But all that is added complication to anybody just starting out and trying to figure out how to actually build themes.
Some of the theme documentation is old, but it is still working as it was! Good idea to maybe collect more of the related info to the same place. But you will still have to start from somewhere and the original WALTER doc actually has everything you'll need to do that. It literally tells you how to start from the clean empty slate and start adding elements one by one, trying out how the changes affect the theme. That is your themeing Hello, World.
If somebody really wants to write the existing documentation anew and maybe even add the later additions, that would be great. But what themeing still takes is actually start doing it, with patience and time. I gather being impatient and not starting out from the basics could be a bigger problem than not having enough documents to start doing it. Other thing is to realize and accept that there are limitations to what you can do with the themes. I salute everybody who has perserverance to go through it.
And theming REAPER isn’t just about programming with WALTER. It also about design. Graphically and logically.
It includes preparing the assets. i.e there are pink/yellow lines thing for certain controls, image strips, etc. which might seems obvious at first but once you’ve entered Retina/HiDPI territory, combine all of those prepared assets with logic and hacks to achieve the best user experience REAPER could possibly provide with theme & WALTER (they are different)—instantly things get super complicated.
Several layout for TCP, MCP, ENVCP, with custom toolbar icons means thousand of images to be prepared.
Some things need to be tweaked via Theme developer/tweaker, some things only could be accessed via WALTER, the rest are just the ugliness limitation you have to cope because how REAPER GUI was designed to be efficient using OS native GUI.
Yet there are countless variables in the user’s end (OS, REAPER version/preferences, monitor resolution/setup, workflow, etc.) which your theme might or might not work as you expected.
It’s impossible to please everyone with one ultimate theme. That’s why I totally understand it’s really difficult to create the Default REAPER theme.
REAPER provides a very flexible yet limited ways to theme its UI, on the other hand there countless user’s subjective preferences to define the best experience to use REAPER.
yes it's true what you say. But other DAWs prove that its possible to work with them even if offer no theming support. Probably because their UI (as a whole, not only visual part) is designed to be good enough for majority of users.
Saying that I'm just thinking if theming feature is not what is indirectly responsible for suboptimal UI in Reaper
yes it's true what you say. But other DAWs prove that its possible to work with them even if offer no theming support. Probably because their UI (as a whole, not only visual part) is designed to be good enough for majority of users.
Saying that I'm just thinking if theming feature is not what is indirectly responsible for suboptimal UI in Reaper
Their stuff isn't as fullpacked with features as Reaper is.
Their designs actually benefits from the limitations in number of features on their side, keeping it clearer because of that. Their UIs would be horrible, if they had at least half of the features of Reaper.
This is the biggest problem IMHO when themeing: You have to design for the target audience/most common usecases, theme in the stuff they need and leave out stuff, they usually don't need.
And most of the times, the thrown-out stuff is someone's most favorite and perfect feature "WhiteTie has to put into it, or the default theme is shit".
Defaults need scarifices to be made and, to be honest: It's almost impossible to pull off what WhiteTie is trying to achieve anyway, because Reaper has so many features.
I want to give you an example: Our Ultraschall extension is using its own theme. This is much clearer than anything I've seen so far and makes Reaper not only look better, but also more easy to use for beginners.
BUT!
The whole theme is designed with focus on the needs of podcast-producers. So if you want to make music with it using extensive parameter-stuff, MIDI-notes and so on, our theme is the worst thing you could ever imagine, as it is missing all the things, that podcasters never need, but musicians heavily rely on.
This is the biggest strength and the biggest weakness in Reaper at the same time: flexibility and customizability.
The only thing to solve the default-theme-issue(which has been discussed in here as well) would be to make variations of the default theme, with focus on different needs, like one for recording of audio-music, one for recording of midi-music, one for mixing, one for video, etc, etc.
They would only keep in, what is needed and throw out, what is not needed for that particular usecase, like the Ultraschall-Theme is doing for podcasters.
And an easier way to switch between these different themes/layout would be needed in Reaper, so you could switch between them by a keystroke.
This is already possible, but needs scripting AFAIK and this is too much for beginners.
UI-Design is more difficult, than many people actually think it is. And if you think, you know how hard it is: multiply it by 5000 and you have a sense on how difficult it REALLY is.
I think that a teamwork can do better work on the default theme.
the GUI should be more intuative and it's not only the theme work, but also support from the devs.
for example the FX window is something that belongs to the 90s....the fx window should have much more options and also an option to show icons instead of an tiresome lists of plugins...visuals proved to work much faster than reading lists, 10 times more intuative.
i have at least 6 friends that don't use reaper because of its GUI
holding fingers for R6 to be more user friendly.
I think that a teamwork can do better work on the default theme.
the GUI should be more intuative and it's not only the theme work, but also support from the devs.
for example the FX window is something that belongs to the 90s....the fx window should have much more options and also an option to show icons instead of an tiresome lists of plugins...visuals proved to work much faster than reading lists, 10 times more intuative.
i have at least 6 friends that don't use reaper because of its GUI
holding fingers for R6 to be more user friendly.
Teamwork is a great idea but even more important is making Reaper easily themable so we can have many more themes to choose from and easy ways to customize them. No theme will suit everyone but if they can be easily customized then everyone has a good chance to be happy.
Teamwork is a great idea but even more important is making Reaper easily themable so we can have many more themes to choose from and easy ways to customize them. No theme will suit everyone but if they can be easily customized then everyone has a good chance to be happy.
I prefer to stick to the default, but I need it to be very very good.
this way I don't need to theme everything again and again when new features arive...
I already wasted tones of time trying to make reaper more musical friendly instead of making music...
the default needs to be a real bomb...so I won't have to change anything in order to have inpiration and make music intuatively.
if i need to waste time on theming and searching for fixes all the time just to work correctly then reaper is not for me.
just like my friends don't use reaper...they are muscians, not graphic designers and they make great music in less featured DAWs than reaper but 100 times better GUI than reaper...
I think that a teamwork can do better work on the default theme.
It's not like it hasn't been tried already. (Although, it depends on what you mean by "teamwork".)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Reflected
I have at least 6 friends that don't use reaper because of its GUI
Well, I have 20-30 friends that have dumped their respective DAWs for REAPER over the years since V3. Perhaps the issue is more than just that it doesn't look [current DAW name here]-ish enough ...
this way I don't need to theme everything again and again when new features arive...
You never need to do that anyway. At times a new feature benefits from a tweak or two to make visuals fit your style, sometimes a bunch of new images are introduced that give you new possibilities (but there's always a fallback if you don't care), but never ever do you need to redo everything. That's gross overstatement.
I'd love theming to be easier, but I don't see very much leeway. Theming in a complex environment will always be something that affords expertise and diligence.
What I'd think would be possible though would be some overall hue/luminosity/contrast sliders that overlay the complete GUI. But they would always be a compromise, stuff looking better at some areas but worse on others. Unavoidable.
You never need to do that anyway. At times a new feature benefits from a tweak or two to make visuals fit your style, sometimes a bunch of new images are introduced that give you new possibilities (but there's always a fallback if you don't care), but never ever do you need to redo everything. That's gross overstatement.
I'd love theming to be easier, but I don't see very much leeway. Theming in a complex environment will always be something that affords expertise and diligence.
What I'd think would be possible though would be some overall hue/luminosity/contrast sliders that overlay the complete GUI. But they would always be a compromise, stuff looking better at some areas but worse on others. Unavoidable.
That would be a good feature request.
Processing images in that way is ridiculously fast, since there are free libraries for that out there. All the images are cached in memory anyway.
Creating a GUI for that is a lot easier now with all the Lua stuff around. Hue, saturation, lumunosity overall and for each section(TCP/MCP/Icon images/etc.).
Viewing this from the cheap seats, and with somewhat limited knowledge of coding and all that, I don't see any way to greatly simplify theming in Reaper, to reduce it to something really, really, simple or easy for anyone to do, short of some adventurous coder wrapping all of that stuff into stand alone theme editor application which would keep any relative complexity in the background.
Lots of moving parts, lots of individual things to color and/or arrange and/or outline in various ways. By it's very nature it has to involve a certain level of complexity. Wrapping all of that into a really easy to use theme editor application would be … good... but probably not easy to do either.
I imagine a person who did that would find their PayPal donation account growing considerably.
I suppose one would have to start my creating all of those various mockups of the Reaper UI parts in the app, and go from there. I'm sure it's possible. The question is whether it's worth the time and effort.
I prefer to stick to the default, but I need it to be very very good.
this way I don't need to theme everything again and again when new features arive...
I already wasted tones of time trying to make reaper more musical friendly instead of making music...
the default needs to be a real bomb...so I won't have to change anything in order to have inpiration and make music intuatively.
if i need to waste time on theming and searching for fixes all the time just to work correctly then reaper is not for me.
just like my friends don't use reaper...they are muscians, not graphic designers and they make great music in less featured DAWs than reaper but 100 times better GUI than reaper...
there is close to zero chance anything is going to be set up where you don't have to change anything. That's what the other Daws are for. Reaper is for customization and flexibility and unfortunately themes still have a ways to go to reach that level but it is possible and very desirable because the chance of a default theme suiting everyone is zero
True. It's one of those things where forum opinions may or may not equal a majority. It's hard to know.
Just for the sake of argument say there are 800,000 Reaper users and 780,000 of them are perfectly ok with the default themes, never change it, and don't care about any of that. It's really impossible to know without a mass email opinion poll or something. In that regard it's more about pleasing the vocal regulars in the forum who apparently do care a lot about that.
To your point, most other products just make something they think is pleasing for most users and dont worry much about it. But yes, once you open that door for changing it various opinions will be all over the place.
But you are correct. There is no such thing as a software UI or theme that everyone loves. That's an impossibility.
There are, for me, themes I like better than the default themes though and of course, not sure why anyone would complain about a default if it can be improved or changed with another theme anyway.
i don't understand, why people complain, that WALTER is too hard and blablabla, it's very easy,
"Easy" is relative. What's easy for one person is probably hard for someone else.
I do understand what you're saying though, once you know or learn or understand how to do something it seems easier to you, sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy for everyone else to learn.
It's all a matter of perspective. My brain doesn't work like the X-Man's so what's easy for him is quite a challenge for me.
except maybe few new additions, which were added in reaper 5, you don't even really need that big guide, written by White Tie.
You don't need to write such ridiculously overcomplicated code like in default 5 theme, just forget about it, look at RADO-v4 theme for example, it's small and easy, 1 day of figuring out and you go.
Building a theme in Lua will be MUCH harder, because it involves a lot of stuff, which WALTER takes care of, building a theme in extension even more, 10x harder, than in Lua, making a theme builder is a tremendous waste of time, it doesn't worth it IMO.
I also think, that this new script for reaper 6 is not needed, it just adds additional layer of complexity and bugs on top of WALTER, instead some detailed video tutorials, about how to make a theme in WALTER, using simple code and about creating small Lua scripts for controlling theme elements could be much better.
I agree that making a theme builder is not a good use of time. If theming is as easy as you say then thats a good thing. Any chance you can make a few in depth videos on the subject?
True. It's one of those things where forum opinions may or may not equal a majority. It's hard to know.
Just for the sake of argument say there are 800,000 Reaper users and 780,000 of them are perfectly ok with the default themes, never change it, and don't care about any of that. It's really impossible to know without a mass email opinion poll or something. In that regard it's more about pleasing the vocal regulars in the forum who apparently do care a lot about that.
This, exactly. In this thread, there are ~8 people who have expressed dislike of the default theme. Some of them more than once in the same thread.
I'd wager that most Reaper users are busy using the software rather than making forum posts. So whatever their opinion happens to be, we are never actually exposed to it.
And as jrengmusic pointed out, the more difficult part of theming is not to do with scripting, but rather, the actual design work itself. No matter how easy the framework is, that won't make the average Reaper user into a better graphic/UI designer. All it would do is make it so that the stash is flooded with a higher percentage of amateur/garbage themes since the bar of entry will be lowered substantially. So even if you have a fancy GUI for editing themes easily, it's still going to take you many hours of actual design work, testing, fixes, tweaking, etc to develop a good theme. There aren't really any shortcuts for that.
I agree with the notion that the best route is improving the documentation, rather than changing the framework itself. Because let's be honest, if you don't even understand the current system, how can one be so sure of what improvements it actually needs? (And I'm not talking about subjective stuff like "oh this bit looks too 90s," I mean objective technical improvements)
As an analogy: In this day and age, we all have access to myriad tools that make composing music quicker and easier than it has ever been. So why aren't we all brilliant composers, then? It's almost like... dare I say it... the quality of tools isn't the limitation here. So having tools to make theming quicker and easier than it has ever been, is not even close to a guarantee that the quality of themes will increase.
As for the argument of "I have 6 friends who won't even use Reaper because of the GUI," well it sounds like Reaper isn't a good fit for them anyway. From what I can tell after having been a user since 2.0 (and of the default themes, to boot), its whole philosophy has been function over form.
Use the software that does what you need it to do. If "looks" keep a user away from it, clearly the power/flexibility it offers isn't that much of a priority for that particular user, and they'd probably be better served by another DAW. Horses for courses.
I think that a teamwork can do better work on the default theme.
the GUI should be more intuative and it's not only the theme work, but also support from the devs.
for example the FX window is something that belongs to the 90s....the fx window should have much more options and also an option to show icons instead of an tiresome lists of plugins...visuals proved to work much faster than reading lists, 10 times more intuative.
i have at least 6 friends that don't use reaper because of its GUI
holding fingers for R6 to be more user friendly.
I'm more experienced creating themes in reaper than winamp, but whatever they did back then (15 years ago?) seemed to inspire a huge amount of designers. Not sure how involved Justin was in that, but obviously it's not like what people want isn't possible, it's just not as important as video feature #4124398
just a glimpse into how flexible ui development could be. Cockos could take a que from video games and other software, where they use Flash and other web-based ui techniques, which help bring in ux designers with a lower barrier to entry. WALTER is okay and growing the functionality with scripts is a relatively quick fix for the devs, but obviously not as flexible or well known as something like an HTML5-style process which web developers would be able to easily jump into. Throw in the ability for vector graphics and javascript-style expand ability... eh, just an idea, Justin probably already thought of it but decided against it because the core of REAPER and things like scrollbar functionality (by some other dude, not really part of CockOS) are already established and it'd be a pain to kinda dig all that stuff up again, you'd be kinda looking into redeveloping the entire app to support something probably not very many people will take advantage of?
Do you have any critical things to say about Reaper? WT? Themes? Anything Cockos? Ever? lol
Just because I don't openly complain as though I'm owed special treatment doesn't mean I don't have criticisms. If you knew me at all, you'd know that.
But I guess I'm expected to be on some Facebook group to whinge about a theme which I can choose to use or not, among countless other themes available for Reaper (or that I can edit or make my own for that matter). Yeah that makes sense. That sounds so productive! See you there!
Last edited by JamesPeters; 05-11-2019 at 01:04 PM.
Just because I don't openly complain as though I'm owed special treatment doesn't mean I don't have criticisms. If you knew me at all, you'd know that.
But I guess I'm expected to be on some Facebook group to whinge about a theme which I can choose to use or not, among countless other themes available for Reaper (or that I can edit or make my own for that matter). Yeah that makes sense. That sounds so productive! See you there!
No no silly I don't mean fb I don't use fb. Kinda just meant here in the forums.
__________________ 47.8% of statistics are made up.
No no silly I don't mean fb I don't use fb. Kinda just meant here in the forums.
I've reported bugs, made feature requests, and had discussions about things that could be improved. I try to be civil, that's all. I don't always succeed, but I try.
I don't see a point in insisting changes be made just for my sake, or that "everyone else will want what I'm saying is important in Reaper" (which is almost always a lie, for the person to make his case to get what he wants). I don't want to make insults about Reaper, the devs, or its users who don't want the things that I want in Reaper. I usually just state my case, and let that 2c be what it's worth. Anything else is pointless. The devs know a vocal minority doesn't represent the entire user base. Being the kind of person that continually stamps his feet making demands isn't going to help, because the devs see them for what they are. If I can see them for what they are, and I haven't been here nearly as long as the devs, I'm sure they see it. It gets pretty easy to spot the same few user names over and over.
You'll also notice I didn't claim this alpha version 6 theme is perfect. It just happens to be the best match for me out of all the themes I've tried...and I'm going to edit it. Maybe it won't need as much editing for my tastes when it's complete, so I'm just waiting. I did already change colors in the MIDI editor though (the kind of thing you can do in the theme tweaker, and save separately).
:lol:
Linear Mode
