status

I picked up where i left off on the Software Update stuff, but found out that there were still a bunch of spots that were unfinished. It’s a difficult thing to test—you can’t directly initiate all of the possible states of the Update window like you can with a toolbar button. You just have to check for updates, and lucky for me, 1.5.0.2 was just pushed out. So that meant hitting update, and then pausing the download to inspect the window, then making style changes, closing the window and stopping the download, and then reopening the window to review. Repeat until just right. So now i think i have the Download page of the Update wizard looking okay. Not sure about the rest—not sure how to invoke them. Also did a little logical rearragement of the stylesheet to align with the XUL source. That was about a week ago.

The other night i tackled the long-neglected new Options prefwindow. It took me a minute to understand how everything was structured. Partly because prefwindows are new to me, and partly because i’m stale and it takes me a little while to really get into the XUL/CSS mentality. I referenced the stylesheets of the old preference window and some other similar parts to refresh. Fortunately, i was able to copy/paste a lot of the styles from similar areas and they carried the LCD look over with minimal adjustment.

Most of the work was done in global/preferences.css—establishing the parent styles for all prefwindows. I was going for a tabbed look sans icons for the panel buttons at the top, which is something i actually tried to achieve long ago when the buttons were on the left side. All that fell into place fairly easily. But i ran into some issues with borders being eaten and prefpanel content being obscured. Couldn’t completely track down why, but some prefpanels had a limited size, no matter how large the parent prefwindow was. This was fixed by adding an overflow: visible; rule to prefpane > .content-box. The content boxes were set to hidden in the content stylesheets. So then i had to ensure the Options prefwindow size was large enough so that no options would be obscured.

I didn’t yet get to customizing the individual prefpanels, but there’s definitely going to be some work on on the tabpanels on the Privacy and Advanced panels. Because the main window is using the tab analogy, i’m not sure how well the nested tabpanels will work. I have a few ideas in mind, but i may need to make some bigger changes. Or figure out another way to style the main panel buttons.

Still need to work on the feed thingy in the URL bar. I think that’ll cover all the major sore spots. Then it should just be tweaking and clean up.