Red Plastic to take________________________________________________________now version 1.01,
advantage of its new_______________________________________________________which includes a
added features.____________________________________________________________few minor tweaks.
Cool Silver Icons for Your Mac
If you ask me, the lavender folder icons that come with Kaleidoscope don’t blend well with Red Buttons. I’ve come across a number of 3-D silver icon sets on the Internet, but virtually all of them have defects. Starting with a set developed by Rich Chen <richchen@charm.net>, I’ve combined features from the best of them and substantially tweaked them to eliminate all defects, creating a set of icons that blend beautifully with my Red Buttons. These icons are contained in the file Red Buttons Silver. If you like these icons, use Red Buttons Silver. If you’d rather stick with the original scheme in Kaleidoscope, then use the standard version of Red Buttons. Just remember that you need to restart your Mac to get the silver icons.
Cool Red Cursors for Your Mac
To complement your new red buttons, I’ve also thrown in my Red Cursors for use with Wilhelm Plotz’s and Alexander Falk’s Cursor Animator. Forget about the old ugly black & white cursors you’re used to. Cursor Animator will replace them with colorful, dynamic cursors to complement any desktop. My Red Cursors blend perfectly with Red Buttons (see the red arrow above, for example). Included are two types of red arrows, two types of red crosses, a red plus and a red insert bar, each with a darker standard icon and a lighter one to be used when the mouse button is pressed. Also included is a red planet cursor to replace Apple’s standard wristwatch cursor. It is based on a rotating planet Mars which, of course, is red.
Why Red?
Red is my wife’s favorite color. Also, red looks particularly good against a gray background. My sincere apologies, however, to those of you who are red-green colorblind.
How to Install
To install Red Plastic, Red Buttons or Red Buttons Silver, place the enclosed files in your “Kaleidoscope Color Schemes” folder which should be in the “Extensions” folder of your system folder. (You can install all three files if you want, but only the appropriate ones will be recognized by your particular version of Kaleidoscope.) If you don’t have a “Kaleidoscope Color Schemes” folder, then you probably don’t have Kaleidoscope and you’ll need to download this first (see below). Once you have dropped Red Plastic, Red Buttons or Red Buttons Silver into the color schemes folder, simply open or reopen the Kaleidoscope control panel and select the appropriate Red color scheme.
To install Red Cursors, open your Cursor Animator control panel. Again, if you don’t have a Cursor Animator control panel in your control panels folder, then you need to download this first (see below). Click on the floppy disk icon to select the Red Cursors file to open. When the Open/Save dialog reappears, click on Done to close it. This may seem strange, but you now need to close and reopen Cursor Animator. Don’t ask me why—I didn’t write it. Now you can scroll down the list of available cursors and select those you wish to use. To use one of my cursors, simply drag it from the cursor list to the boxes under the corresponding Apple cursor it will replace. The upper box will be used for the cursor when the mouse button is up (not pressed) and the lower one will be used when the mouse button is down (pressed). Be careful dragging the cursors around in Cursor Animator, however, as the implementation of drag & drop is a bit flaky and you may end up getting the wrong cursor. I usually drag my cursors straight horizontally out of the cursor list and then drag them where I want them. Note that you can also get info on a cursor by dragging it to the info icon, or you can remove cursors from the list by dragging them to the trash icon.
About Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope is a shareware control panel that allows you to change the appearance of the icons, system fonts, windows and buttons that your computer uses. It is loosely based on the 3-D appearance developed by Apple Computer for future releases of the MacOS. Originally slated for release as part of system 8, also known as Copland, this general appearance will be available as part of the system 8.0 “Tempo” release, expected in mid–late 1997. Building on an earlier extension known as “Aaron”, Kaleidoscope allows you to customize the look of your Mac or Mac-compatible. Version 1.5 adds formal support for third party plug-ins such as this one, while at the same time adding a great deal more flexibility in designing color schemes—flexibility I have taken advantage of in designing Red Buttons version 1.5.
You can download the latest version of Kaleidoscope from the Kaleidoscope home page:
<http://greg.math.harvard.edu/kaleidoscope.html>
or from your neighborhood Info-Mac mirror.
About Cursor Animator
Cursor Animator is a delightful interface addition to any Mac. Written by Wilhelm Plotz and Alexander Falk in 1990, it allows substitution of any variety of cursors for the standard Mac cursors. This is no simple one-cursor substitute like some you have seen on the Web. It is an easy-to-use cursor management control panel and, with it, your Mac’ll never look the same. Best of all, Cursor Animator is free.
You can download the latest version of Cursor Animator from the c.net’s shareware.com home page:
As far as I know, Red Plastic, Red Buttons, Red Buttons Silver and Red Cursor work properly with most applications. Some applications, however, use their own button, window, scroll bar, menu and cursor schemes and will not display my beautiful versions. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about this. Also, Microsoft products are notorious for doing things their own way and, although my scroll bars will work, they will not work as well as they should. At present I know of no application for which my schemes are unusable.
I have taken care to insure that Red Buttons and Red Buttons Silver work well with DoubleScroll, Ed Voas’ control panel that adds double arrows to both ends of the scroll bar and that provides much finer control of scroll bar action. If you have not tried DoubleScroll, I highly recommend it. You can download Double Scroll from Ed’s website: <http://users.aol.com/isysdev>.
I have also taken care to ensure full compatibly and consistent appearance with Smart Scroll, Marc Moini’s control panel that gives your Mac proportional scroll bars. What are proportional scroll bars? With proportional scroll bars, the size of the scroll thumb is changed to reflect the proportion of the total document that is visible within its respective window. With Red Buttons and Red Buttons Silver, the scroll thumb becomes a rounded red bar that grows longer in proportion to the visible portion of the document. If you have not tried Smart Scroll, I highly recommend it. Smart Scroll can be downloaded form <http://www.kagi.com/authors/marc/>.
What to do if there are problems
First of all, I didn’t write Kaleidoscope or Cursor Animator and I am not a Mac programmer, so please don’t contact me unless you can specifically isolate the problem to Red Plastic, Red Buttons, Red Buttons Silver or Red Cursors. To do so, try out some of the other color schemes included with Kaleidoscope or some of those available on the internet. If the problem you experience seems to be specific to my color schemes or cursors, then contact me via e-mail or snail mail as listed below. I can make no guarantees, however, that I can fix your problem, and these products are offered without any implied warrantees. In other words, use them at your own risk.
How I made Red Buttons and Red Cursors
Red Buttons has its roots in the original Aaron extension. Starting with the Aaron color scheme provided with Kaleidoscope, I made only minor tweaks to the overall window appearance. Using the red plastic buttons from the Sherbet color scheme as a guide, I created my own set of red buttons against a gray background, matched to the Aaron window color. I also changed the scroll arrows so that they push in rather than slide when pressed, giving a more consistent feel. My red buttons are more rounded and generally more consistent in appearance than those in Sherbet. There are other minor tweaks to all the buttons as compared to Sherbet, as you may notice if you look closely. The scroll thumb has also been changed to a round red plastic button on a continuous track which, when pressed, causes the scroll bar to recede and separate track to pop out of a deeper scroll channel. The ghost thumb rides on top of this track—an effect that is particularly cool.
For Red Cursors, I used the cursors included with Cursor Animator as a template, but I basically started from scratch and created the cursors one pixel at a time using the same colors used in Red Buttons. Creating the rotating Mars cursor Red Planet was a particular challenge. For this I started with a downloaded rectangular map of the Martian surface. Using Photoshop, I step-by-step offset the map horizontally in progressive increments, cropped the width in half, used the sphereize function, cropped the result to a circle and pasted the resulting icons using ResEdit. This is basically the same approach I used with the earth for my 4/5th place winning entry to the Netscape logo animation contest.
I have taken care to insure that windows and window buttons look good on both color and monochrome displays with everything from B&W to millions of colors. You will find very few other color schemes that can make this claim. There are, however, some shortcomings to Red Buttons that are largely due to limitations inherent in Kaleidoscope and in the color QuickDraw routines of the MacOS itself. In particular, the scroll bars and buttons don’t integrate well on certain color displays when only 16 colors can be displayed, due to a mix of resource types in Kaleidoscope. The scroll arrow design I would have liked to have used looks terrible when Ed Voas’ Double Scroll is installed, forcing me to make compromises. As a result, the ends of the scroll bars are indistinct in some applications. Greg has promised fixes for these problems in a future version of Kaleidoscope.
Contacting the author
This is funware. If you like my scheme, enjoy it and have fun. If you have any comments, please feel free to drop me a line with your kudos or complaints. I’m always open to suggestions.
If you must send me snail mail, you can reach me at:
Stephen F. Levinson
Department of Phys. Med. & Rehab.
University of Rochester School of Med. & Dent.
601 Elmwood Ave., Box 664
Rochester, NY 14642
Registering Kaleidoscope
By all means, please register your copy of Kaleidoscope! Support the shareware system!
Instructions for registering Kaleidoscope are included in the Kaleidoscope package.
If you use DoubleScroll or Smart Scroll, please register them also.
Copyright Info
Kaleidoscope is a registered trademark of Amargosa Software, Inc. Cursor Animator is under the copyright of Wilhelm Plotz and Alexander Falk. The author retains copyright of Red Plastic, Red Buttons, Red Buttons Silver and Red Cursors, but please feel free to experiment with your own modifications. If you do make modifications, however, I do insist that you maintain the overall quality and integrity of the scheme. Please do not repost these schemes without including this ReadMe file. I hereby give permission to include these schemes on CD-ROMs and in other media, subject to the same condition. Any modified version of Red Plastic or Red Buttons must make acknowledgment of the original author.
