Theme Template Instructions
by Max Rudberg, december 2003

Purpose
When creating a complete theme, you need to specify the appearance of the operating system's buttons. They are called Push buttons and Popup buttons.

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If you count the number of images used to make the large and small push and popup buttons, that is exactly 100 images (!!). It's easy to understand that this is what keeping many people who would like to make a theme, from actually making one. I believe this is also why we have many themes with a lot of Aqua elements left in them. So, with my knowledge of how these 100 images work, I decided to make this Theme Template that will create all these images for you!

In Panther, the Push Buttons have been simplified so you no longer need to make all the parts for the Small button. The same has been done to the Large Push Button, however, some Carbon apps (like Goliath) still use the old resources because the can be stretched vertically. So if you want to make a really complete theme, you might still want to change the Jaguar Large Carbon Push Buttons, which is located in the Obsolete category in ThemePark. 
I'm pretty sure that the Small Jaguar Carbon Push Buttons really are obsolete though, because I have not seen them anywhere.

Use
You need Photoshop 7 or CS (the template has not been tested with any previous version) and ThemePark.

The template comes with a set of Photoshop actions, so first of all you have to load the actions into Photoshop. Do this by opening the Actions palette and click the little arrow in the upper right of the window. Then scroll that menu and choose "Load Actions…" and locate the "Theme Template.atn".

Then you can open the "Theme Template.psd". To create your own buttons, what you need to do is to create them in place of the Aqua buttons. As you can see in the Layers palette, I have sorted the buttons into different folders. The green folder are the ones that you are supposed to change. The red folders are not ment to be changed. They are part of the actions script and keep track of how to copy the buttons. Since each green folder is linked to the corresponding red folder, you can rearrange the layout of the buttons without destroying the template. 

In most folders there are a layer named Button size and it's marked with yellow. If you make this layer visible, you see what size I suggest that you make your button. You can also tell how they are split into different parts:

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The blue and red color is the button Caps. The green is the Fill. The fill should be made so that it can be repeated without looking bad. As I mentioned, this is the size that I recommend that you use for your buttons. It's ok to make them a pixel or two larger, but if you make them much larger, they will be cut off in some apps and look bad.

It is very important that you do NOT rename any of the layers. I'm sure there are some spelling errors, but if you correct them, the actions will stop functioning.

Basically all buttons contain layers called regular, pushed and inactive. The regular is the regular button, the pushed is the pushed and the inactive is the inactive and disabled button state.

The push buttons are named like this:

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Specific or this button is the "Pushed Blue 2" and "Pushed Graphite 2" layer. That is the image that the button fade to when it is the default button. It fades from Pushed to Pushed 2.

The popup buttons are named like this:

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The "Text" layers are for the part of the Popup button that is used to have text over it. 
The other ones are for the Arrow part. The clear layer is for inactive cocoa buttons.

The Large Progressbar is named like this:

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These should be pretty self explanatory. Note that the Bar Inactive is only used in Cocoa apps. Carbon apps use the Bar Active for both active and inactive states. So if you are picky with consistency, you should make both Bar Active and Bar Inactive use the same image.
All progress indicators (including Indeterminate) have to be opaque. If you made them too small or using transparency, the script will include parts of the background Bar and the background color.

Be sure that your layers have the same name as the original ones. You can either just make the button in the same layer, or paste your own button and remove the content of the layer and then choose to merge the two.

If your layer has transparency, be sure that you merge that layer with a empty layer so that the transparency is preserved when it's copied.
Example:

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Then merge that layer with a fresh one:

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And the transparency will be preserved, but the opacity is 100%:

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When you have created your custom buttons, open the Actions palette:

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Then locate the correct Action script. Start with the regular script and hit play. Some script take a couple of minutes to play, so you can take a coffe brake while you wait for it to finish. When it finish, you have to paste the images into Theme Park. It should not be any trouble finding the corresponding images, since all images in Photoshop are named.

Important notes:
- Once you start playing a script, don't switch between applications, just let it run. Otherwise the script might fail.

- You can only have the Theme Template.psd document open when running scripts, otherwise the script will fail when trying to switch between documents.

- If the resulting button is too high or low in relation to the text, run one of the other script and the button will be moved 1 pixel higher or lower.

- If your progressbar background caps and fill are misplaced, you will have to move it to top of the image manually.

- The Small Push Button and Small Popup Button have layers that are named the same. If both Layer folders are present when running one of the Small Push Button or Small Popup Button script, the script will fail. To work around this, remove the Layer Folder that you are not working with and run the script. Hopefully this should not be too much trouble since the Small Push Button script seems to be obsolete in Panther.

That's it. If all has gone well, your button should be finished.

If you have any suggestions or bug reports, email me at max_08@mac.com.

Version History:
1.1
- Fixed incompatibility with Adobe Photoshop CS. The script caused a crash because a "/" (slash) was included in some new document commands. I simply removed the "/" from all scrips and now it works fine.
- Added Large and Small progressbars.
- Updated this Read Me.