I'm sure this comes from being really used to plain old XP, but a lot of the available LiteStep themes are really hard to navigate through. Now, I'm no LiteStep artist, but I am hoping that I could recommend someone might make a new LS theme with these ideas in mind:

1. Very minimalist, with perhaps a glass-clear (i.e. WinVista Aero) startmenu box that fades away when the mouse is not over it. Or, one that fades to nothing until the Windows Button is pressed.

2. Where the active programs are listed in a Mac OSX-style GUI menu off to the side that fades away when the mouse isn't over it.

3. Where your common programs are listed in a Mac OSX-style GUI menu off to the other side that fades away when the mouse isn't over it.

4. When you recieve notification (of a new E-mail in Thunderbird, or that downloads are complete, etc...), an enlarged image of the program icon fades in, then fades out.

5. Something that breaks down the start menu into a dynamic treebranch-style menu.

6. A theme that doesn't feel terribly uncomfortable to someone who is used to XP, provided he already hates desktop icons and is very keyboard-oriented.

Essentially, I'd like to see someone make a LS theme that is completely invisible until the mouse/keyboard activates it. Something that is entirely see-thru, with minimal interupption. Good luck to anyone who's willing to give this a shot.

The problem with having things hidden away on the side of the screen is that it makes things take longer to access. You have to "scrub" with the mouse to find your program, especially if you have multiple folders or files with the same icon. This is one of the big problems with the apple dock.
I also find the start menu a little clumsy to use.

On the other hand, there are only a few people out there as obsessive as me about Fitts' law, and I think this has the potential to be a very popular theme.

I'm feeling up for something new and different...I'll let you know when I finish.

Coo! Thank you very much.

OMG hurt my head with that crap. Though a good law, ugh.. my brain.

I get the feeling some people think Wikipedia is a contest to see who can put the most cross-references to other articles with technical-sounding titles.

Do you want desktop icons?

Thanks, but nah. I don't have any programs to replace my icons at once - I have to go and replace every one individually and it's really tiresome. But thanks all the same.

I liked the link about fitts law. In particular the bit about pie menus. I want to make a theme with a single popup menu being the central point for the UI, and a pie menu would be perfect: you hit the WIN key and you're presented with 3 or 4 menus arayed around the mouse - eg: your tasks, the systray info, other info like clock and CPU/RAM etc, a launcher for programmes, a file tree and so on.. These would be seperate menus, so you don't have to mouse down the top level of the popup, select a submenu, select a sub-item, miss the sub item and accidentally select a submenu, go back to the first submenu etc etc. If you've ever used Maya you'll know what I'm talking about (see this).

now I know I'm going to get rtfm'd for this but.. Is there a way to make the popup contain more than one popup?

You could find a round-about way of doing it, but you'd probably have to break OTS2-compliance to do it (not a problem if you don't want to distribute it).

You could probably just hijack the !popup bang to point to your own bang which fires your "various" popups (around the mousepointer) and then have some OnClose events trigger all the other popups to close as well. The popups would probably have to be pinned to avoid them closing prematurely.

This is all off the top of my head, but I believe that it is, technically, possible.

BTW- this probably would have fit best in a new thread instead of hijacking this one which is pretty much solely about Das General's request.. and since this thread is bounced anyways, how's that coming along, jqubit?

yeah, I'll think a bit more about what I want to do and come back with a new thread.

Sorry - I've been out of the states for a while. Probably not the wisest time to take a vacation to Israel, but we had no idea before it started.

I've got a primitive version of the theme working that I'll try to post in the next couple of days. Surprisingly enough, I like it a lot (though not enough to replace agua).

I haven't started on documentation, and I'm having trouble figuring out whether and how to try implementing the notification idea. I also have to add keyboard support for opening all the menus. I'll put up what I have and see what the response is like.