PackageDescription: CGN Chimera Look


CGN Chimera Look

Last published: May 22, 2007 by 'ans'

Defines 70 Classes
Extends 97 Classes

This package implements the Look & Feel "Chimera". Chimera was designed to provide a platform-neutral, minimalistic look, inspired by Java widget toolkits The idea behind Chimera was to provide a consistent design on all operating systems (Windows and OSX currently). The emulated native looks are instantly recognized as being not the "real thing" - so why pretend? A slick custom design has proven to be a viable solution for many applications that can not deal with native widgets for whatever reason.

Chimera comes with some performance optimizations under the hood, most notably faster and smoother window updates, especially for tab controls and resizing splitters. It was tested for VisualWorks 7.4.1. Chimera has no prerequisites and integrates with the VisualWorks L&F framework. After loading the package, go to the VisualWorks settings panel and select "Chimera Windows XP" for Windows and "Chimera MacOS X" for a Mac. Although both versions run on either platform, font sizes and menus look best on the designated machines.

"ChimeraLookPolicy initializeNewColors: #copper "
"ChimeraLookPolicy initializeNewColors: #silver "
"ChimeraLookPolicy initializeNewColors: #gold "
"ChimeraLookPolicy initializeNewColors: #platinum "

Chimera should work also on other platforms. The recommended way to adopt Chimera for new platforms is to create a subclass of ChimeraLookPolicy and ChimeraWidgetPolicy and fine-tune font sizes. There is no need to fiddle with ChimeraFeelPolicy unless you want to do serious hacks with custom keyboard behavior and the like.

Known Limitations:

Chimera works fine with all standard widgets and the UI builder, although some customized views may show visual imperfections w.r.t scrolling and background color (e.g. the RB hierarchy diagram). Resizing splitters use a "handle" image, which requires some additional room. This may not suit all current window layouts, where the splitters are usually very thin. The Mac menu bar is not yet implemented. Comment out the code in ApplicationModel>>postOpenWith: if you encounter problems with the optimized window redrawing policy.

Copyright (c) Andre Schnoor 2005-2007 (in part). Much code was re-used from Cincom Windows XP, Win98 and MacOS X L&F.
The package is free for commercial and non-commercial use, as far as that doesn't conflict with Cincom Smalltalk license.