This weekend, I've been busy hacking on gtk-wimp, GTK+'s native Microsoft Windows theme engine. A lot of things are coming together nicely. What's especially nice is that someone has been submitting nit-picky bugs - things that make a theme author really pay attention to detail. Bug reports are always good. Or as Jody prefers to say, "Anal is good."

/me ducks

Things that work (or work better now):

• Menu/toolbars have a gradient applied to them
• Better handling of menu/toolbar shadows, even tracking how the theme is using them
• Sliders (GTK+ calls them "scales") now use WinXP theming
• Apps with status bars now get the WinXP status bar grippie drawn properly
• Toolbar grippies are drawn nicely too
• Notebook tabs now get that orange stripe across their top
• A host of scrollbar bugs are fixed

There's lots of room for improvement, of course, but things are looking a lot better these days. A screenshot for interested parties. Please file bug reports at sf.net.

I have some requests for GTK+/GNOME application writers, from a themer's perspective:

• Set gtk-button-images=0. Make sure that no dialog buttons have images in them.
• Set gtk-menu-images=0. Make sure that your menus don't have images.
• Play with gtk-icon-sizes. Tweak the toolbar and menu icon sizes. Make sure that your toolbar and menu icons respect those sizes.
• Please set each dialog's alternative button ordering.

These all make a big difference in how "native" your app looks and feels, especially on Win32 as gtk-wimp tweaks a lot of these settings. I'll be pushing these changes upstream to GTK+'s CVS later today or tomorrow.

I'd also like to congratulate Damien and Jonita! I wish you two a happy marriage :)