Awn Manager Preview

So maybe a week or so ago I posted about the Awn theme manager, which was still in early stages but was nice. Well it has made considerable progress, and is now not only a theme manager but pretty much all the preferences, in Awn. In this it now not only has the theme manager where you can install and save your themes, but you can also change you launcher order, and other Awn preferences all from one place. So now its time for a screen shot:



Now as you can see in the screen shot you have different categories listed on the left. The first one General is just like the preferences you would get if you were to right click Awn and click preferences, but this one is a little bit updated. The little update to the general section as you may be able to see in the picture is that you can adjust the bar angle, the bar height, and the icon offset.

The next category on the left is applets, and it looks a little different then the one built in to awn, so here it is:


With the applets you just choose things from the right list and move them into the left list to get them on your Awn. The next catagory is the launchers section which actually is a bit innovative:


The great part about this launchers organizer is that you can drag the different launchers around in there, so there is no need like in the one built into Awn to click a launcher then use arrows to move it. Also I noticed after dragging an icon my dock automatically updated, so I did not have to hit the apply button to make it change my dock. There were to many times with the launcher organizer built into Awn when I organized all my icons then hit ok, without hitting the apply button and then I would need to start all over.

The last category in there is the theme manager which I wrote about in the last post. It pretty much looks the same and seems to act the same. But there may be a few bug fixes in there since the last one. The theme manager allows you to save and install themes from others. Here is a quick screen shot:



Well thats it for now on the Awn theme manager, go try it out!

Well I guess I should share how to get it....

Open a terminal and grab it with this command:

bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~awn-extras/awn-extras/trunk awn-extras

That will get you can awn-extra directory. Within the awn-extras directory navigate into the awn-manager directory and run the awnManager.py

Preview: AWN theme Manager

If you are an AWN user who can't seem to get the right color settings for there dock, then maybe you have tried asking other for their settings? If you have tried that then you know its a pain because there are lots of different things to change, and lost of numbers and letters for the colors... So if you ever wanted to copy someones theme it woudl take a lot of copying and pasting. Or if you made a theme you like and wanted to save it you woudl have to record all the values of the different colors somewhere for you to get later.

Well I got some good news for you all ryancr over at the AWN forum has started work on an AWN theme manager. This post is titled preview for a reason, because this is the initial code of the theme manager, and is buggy. But I thought I would give you a little preview of what its like so far:




The features it has so far are:

• The ability to save a theme that you have created in AWN's preferences and then keep it in the AWN theme manager for later use
• The ability to load in other peoples themes that they have created using the awn theme manager
• The ability to have all your themes you have created or download in one easy place so you can easily change themes back and forth with minimal clicks.
  

Update to my Pidgin Suggestion

Ok so I was pointed over to this link, from a user over at Newsvine. Any who it points me to a Pidgin theme which is pictured to the right. This is a good step forward even though it isn't brand new. People can create themes but now make these themes easier to implement for users who don't want to be browsing through there directories to make theme changes. If you make themes like this easier to implement more people will create pidgin themes, and you will see more be done with the look of pidgin with out having the developers of Pidgin have to re-design it themselves.

The Original Article I wrote on giving Pidgin a face lift is here.