Shade 0.1
An accomplice to the crimes of Marco Nellisen's WindowShade.
 
WindowShade (http://www.xs4all.nl/~marcone/be.html) allows users to change the colors of title tabs, frames and borders in BeOS (it does this by patching the app_server while it's running -- a hack). It does a great job, but it requires users to speak hexadecimal. This menu-driven script lets you type plain-English color values (the "Netscape palette") at menu-driven prompts to tweak one parameter at a time. 

It saves your configurations in two ways -- your ongoing parameter changes are saved to a "current" file. When you find a combination you like, save it to a named config file for later retrieval. Since the last change you make of either kind (single parameter or entire config file) is always saved to your "current" config, the last changes you made will always still be there when you reboot --if you reference the "current" config from UserBootscript. The installer provides bootscript code for you.
 
Three HTML color maps included -- one in greyscale and two in color (one is arranged alphabetically by color name, the other is ordered by hexx name, which pretty much amounts to a spectrum). Just read color names from those maps and type them into Shade. Shade will take care of the hexx conversion for you.

This is a hack based on a hack. No guarantees, but do let me  know of any bugs you uncover.

*** Installation and setup ***

Place the main Shade folder in the directory where it will live permanently (rather than a temp directory) prior to running the installation script -- the installer will query you about this. Open a Terminal in that location and type "shade.install".

Since Shade is useless without WindowShade, the installer will also look for that, and write its path to a settings file.

The Shade subdirectory of Shade will be moved to /boot/home/config/bin. This is where your customized configs will go -- it also includes a few demo files.

It's important to leave the "colorkey" file in the same folder as Shade -- you won't be able to do any color lookups without it.


Usage

After running the installation script, just type "shade" at any Terminal prompt. The menus will take it from there.


Notes

This probably seems like a lot of work for very little reward. Mostly I built this to continue working on my shell skills. I learned a lot about grep and command-line queries, and used awk and sed to build the (admittedly ugly) color charts.

The script is slightly buggy in places. The biggest problem I had was in trying to get it branch properly. All the manuals say you can label sections of a script like this --

label:

and then jump to your labels by name with "goto", but I can't get this to work in BeOS. I'd also like to figure out how to have a script accept runtime arguments so users could launch a different config by typing "shade configname" and bypass the menus. Whatever -- it was just a learning tool. Feel free to hack it apart to suit your needs, etc.


Scot Hacker
beos@birdhouse.org
http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/software/
