Ok well I'm gonna start writing a new theme to take over from my current theme "Plain Sailin"

Anyway, it's been quite a while since I had anything to do with theming, so I want some suggestions. Basically I'm interested in stability, functionality and speed.

What should I use?

I intend to use a system tray, labels, shortcuts, desktop (not desktop icons... you know... like desktop2 or something)
I want to use a VWM, a command box, and uhh yeah... I can't really think of anything else. I'm not interested in putting fancy little weather thingies and games and stuff, just some nice foundational GUI stuff. Check out the screenshot for my Plain Sailin theme - just something simple like that, but I'm gonna be adding some more functionality such as different colour scheme choices, moveable components, hide-able components. So basically, everything can be moved, and everything can be hidden.

It's gonna also be a bit prettier as compared to Plain Sailin, but it'll stay compact, fast and consume as little memory as I can possibly get away with!!

SO err.. yeah... Any recommendations for the fastest, most stable modules with great features? Since I run Windows 98 SE you'll have to keep that in mind if there are some modules which don't have the compatibility.

Thanks!

system tray: systray2
labels: well, label obviously, or possibly xlabel
shortcuts: shortcut2
desktop: desktop2
vwm: rabidvwm or ckvwm (your choice, they're both good)
command: lsxcommand
moving the modules: you'll probably need to load everything in separate boxes
as for win98 compatability, you mainly want to stay away from transparency. there's one or two other things not to use, but I can't remember what.

systemtray: vtray
desktop: jdesk
label 1.98

thanks guys

I was actually planning on just using Label, since that's what I've always used and I'm used to... I had no plans for transparency (since that eats up CPU resources).

I'll have a look at vtray and jdesk.

- jdesk is the best
- vtray doesn't deal fine with iconsaturation
- xlabel allow you to have net in/out and further more
- litestep .24.7b4 allow you an infinite number of recycling before your win98'box crash :)

Well I've already chosen to use jdesk, since it claims to be a lot more stable, etc. than desktop2. I'm quite happy with normal label ;).

And I'm using the version of Litestep which comes with the 2.7 installer which I'm assuming is at least .24.7.

Ok well I got lazy. The theme is finished. I couldn't be bothered making it so you can move stuff around, so everything is fixed in place. Either way, the theme looks great (to me). Should come up in the themes section as "Partay Express" sometime soon! Oh, and I was a silly goose and accidentally forgot to put the right preview screenshot for LSTS in, it's actually got the old one from my Plain Sailin theme!!! *cough*. Is there any way I can update the zip file on the download (once it's actually there)?

And yes, I am planning on more features coming ;).

I don't know why I didn't say vtray. considering that it's actually the tray module I'm using right now...

Ok well from using my theme only a few hours, I have aleady noticed that using Jdesk in place of desktop2 has increased the stability IMMENSELY! I'm comparing to my Plain Sailin theme, that is.

Yay! It's HEAPS faster as well... I'm quite impressed. The only bad thing is that because I'm using icons in the Popup menu now, and I notice it lags when it has to keep loading different icons. So I used Cacheman to increase the icon cache (remember - I'm using Windows 98, XP probably has better icon cache management) and I think it's going a bit better.

But wow, I have NEVER seen my email client (Groupwise) or Mozilla load so quickly!

Yes, I am boasting for the guys who wrote jdesk, vtray and ckvwm ;).