Customizing Interface (Custom Icons and Themes)

[FarCGS]

Let's say that I decide to revamp the current Audacity design by recreating and enhancing the Audacity icons and the menu interface through Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or even a 3d program, such as Blender.. Is there a way that I could implement these designs into the current compilation of code? I'm not a developer.. Just an artist. If I knock out these designs and create a better overall theme for Audacity, would someone be willing to embed them onto the current interface for me? I bet if Audacity was prettier, more people would be using it..

[Edgar]

I seriously doubt that any of the "official" Developers have both the time and desire to do this. As far as I know, there are no other hobbyist programmers (besides myself) playing with these aspects and, personally, I have only glanced at the icons and cursors. Feel free to look at this thread:
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=69511
where I am documenting my investigations.

[steve]

To use custom icons, "Theme support" needs to be enabled. Note that this is an experimental feature. It was enabled in Audacity 1.3.8 but not in later versions.
To enable Theme support in the current version of Audacity requires building Audacity from the source code and enabling theme support.

Further information here: viewtopic.php?p=177720#p177720

Audacity 1.3.8 is not recommended for normal use, but may be an easy way to experiment with custom icons and is available here: http://alturl.com/hwyug

[FarCGS]

I was thinking something like this would be nice..

[Edgar]

Personally, I prefer the current round buttons to your rounded squares. However, I think the graphics which you propose give us a chance for improving the current GUI.

buttons.png (60.11 KiB) Viewed 9708 times

On the top left is the current design. Below that I pasted your original as copied from this thread and overwrote it with the default depressed Play button and then alternate darker-grayed green fill. On the top right are your buttons shrunk down (maybe a bit too much) to fit the current sizing. At the bottom right are my tentative thoughts about visually presenting the Skip To buttons such that it is visually obvious when the cursor is at one end or the other of the track – the darker purple is "able to be pushed" the light gray–purple is "disabled".

Note that you did not present depressed versions of your icons. Note also that some of the icons are "momentary" and do not stay depressed and thus do not need depressed versions.