Re: Agave (git version) startup error

[Dave Foster]

Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
> Great. glad it works now. Can you tell me a little more now about what
> you're trying to add, and how you imagine it working? I didn't quite
> understand the goal or use case from your original description.
>
Sure, sorry for the prior brevity. I wanted to be able to read a text
file and pull out all colors found in the text of that file, and have
those colors be added to the favorites (or similar). I'm an Openbox
user, and often times when trying to tweak a theme, I have trouble going
between hex and visual representations, so it would be great if I could
physically see the colors all laid out. Not to mention I'm a total
sucker for split-complements and triads when trying to find matching
colors for themes.

I'm sure it would be handy for gtk theming as well, and maybe even
"visualization" of CSS files.

My original plans were to make a really cheap RubyGTK script (to learn
Ruby!) which would just rip out colors and put them in colored buttons,
but there's so much more that can be done with Agave. :)

hopefully that explained it. I'm not sure it'll be totally useful to
anyone else, but this is what OSS is all about eh? :)

dave

[Jonathon Jongsma]

On 8/31/06, Dave Foster <d...@minuslab.net> wrote:
> Sure, sorry for the prior brevity. I wanted to be able to read a text
> file and pull out all colors found in the text of that file, and have
> those colors be added to the favorites (or similar). I'm an Openbox
> user, and often times when trying to tweak a theme, I have trouble going
> between hex and visual representations, so it would be great if I could
> physically see the colors all laid out. Not to mention I'm a total
> sucker for split-complements and triads when trying to find matching
> colors for themes.
>
> I'm sure it would be handy for gtk theming as well, and maybe even
> "visualization" of CSS files.
>
> My original plans were to make a really cheap RubyGTK script (to learn
> Ruby!) which would just rip out colors and put them in colored buttons,
> but there's so much more that can be done with Agave. :)
>
> hopefully that explained it. I'm not sure it'll be totally useful to
> anyone else, but this is what OSS is all about eh? :)
>
> dave
>

Ahh, I see. I actually had something similar in mind. If you look in
the TODO file in the root of the source tree, there's this line:
- Feature: import all colors from a website (stylesheets, html, etc)

I hadn't really put any serious thought into it yet, so I'm not sure
how something like that would be implemented in the UI. Did you have
any ideas about UI?

[by the way, did you know that you can copy a hex string value from a
text file and then paste it into agave (either with the 'paste' menu
item or ctrl-v) and it will set that color to the new color (if it's
valid)? Actually it doesn't even have to be a hex string -- it can be
any named X color (e.g. 'cornflower blue')]

--
jonner

[Dave Foster]

Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
>
> Ahh, I see. I actually had something similar in mind. If you look in
> the TODO file in the root of the source tree, there's this line:
> - Feature: import all colors from a website (stylesheets, html, etc)
>
> I hadn't really put any serious thought into it yet, so I'm not sure
> how something like that would be implemented in the UI. Did you have
> any ideas about UI?

Not really, I was going to do it the cheap way for now by just adding
them to favorites. I suppose it would be a bit better if we had
multiple favorite sets (which could be useful in other uses as well)
instead of trying to maintain one favorites set. Perhaps a dropdown
combo to select these sets (with a "New" option).

> [by the way, did you know that you can copy a hex string value from a
> text file and then paste it into agave (either with the 'paste' menu
> item or ctrl-v) and it will set that color to the new color (if it's
> valid)? Actually it doesn't even have to be a hex string -- it can be
> any named X color (e.g. 'cornflower blue')]

I did not, how neat! That will help with my feature, I think.

dave

[Jonathon Jongsma]

On 8/31/06, Dave Foster <d...@minuslab.net> wrote:

> Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
> >
> > I hadn't really put any serious thought into it yet, so I'm not sure
> > how something like that would be implemented in the UI. Did you have
> > any ideas about UI?
> >

> I just thought of something, perhaps it could be useful... What about a
> unification of the "Palettes" and "Favorites" idea? To be able to
> construct a palette on the fly, and save it somewhere?
>
> dave
>

Yes, I've thought about something like that as well. It wouldn't
really be that hard, since they both use the same backend storage
format (gimp palette format). But I think it would take a bit of
thinking to get the UI right, because it seems to me that a list of
favorites and a 'palette' for picking colors from need to be presented
in somewhat different ways.

Currently there are really no functional differences between palettes
and the list of favorites. However, I've had a feature request from a
couple of people to change the list of favorite colors into a list of
favorite schemes (i.e. save the scheme type along with the color). I
haven't implemented this yet (or even decided whether I want to), but
if it did get implemented it would make the two concepts fairly
different.

--
jonner

[Dave Foster]

Jonathon Jongsma wrote:
>
> I hadn't really put any serious thought into it yet, so I'm not sure
> how something like that would be implemented in the UI. Did you have
> any ideas about UI?
>

[Jonathon Jongsma]

> I think that would work just fine, and give a place to import colors
> into (from my feature idea), with a scheme name from the file's name or
> similar.
>
> dave

Another option: in the git version, I assume you've noticed that there
are multiple palettes available with a combobox along the bottom of
the window. The available palettes are scanned from
$(prefix)/share/agave/palettes and ~/.agave/palettes/. So one option
would be to scan the colors from your theme file (or css or whatever)
and save them as a new palette file in ~/.agave/palettes/. This file
would then be available in the palettes combobox the next time the app
started... That could be a quick-hack sort of solution.

(by the way, if you subscribe to the list then I wouldn't have to keep
CCing you :) If you don't want to that's ok too. See
http://groups.google.com/group/colorscheme-devel for more info).
--
jonner

[Dave Foster]

So I've joined now, but using my gmail address, how's that for
confusion? :)

That solution would actually work right off the bat, but I'm still
thinking it's worthy of addition into the program itself.

[Dave Foster]

Actually, now that I look at it, it seems that the gimp palletes are
stored in RGB only.. I'm more apt to deal with colors in hex.

Also, whats with ~/.agave/bookmarks.gpl:
Columns: 135580400

Overflow maybe? :D

[Jonathon Jongsma]

hmm, yeah. that's clearly wrong. I've actually been thinking about
looking at different formats for storing colors since the gimp one is
very simplistic and kind of limiting. I just used it since it was
fairly widespread already. But I'm not opposed to a different format.
Obviously I'd still want to be able to import gimp palette files, but
it doesn't necessarily need to be the internal storage format.

--
jonner