On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Ram Vedamrvedam@gmail.com wrote:

I was curious if there is a possibility that McCLIM user interfaces can be skinned (change visual appearance) to look more "modern"? I haven't seen too much written on this topic and am wondering if it can currently be done, and if so, how?

There's no out of the box solution for doing skinning (whatever that would entail - some kind of pixmap theme engine, I guess), although I think it's a fine idea.. provided you hire a professional graphic designer to create the skin ;). If you want to experiment with this, you can subclass the gadgets you're using and define new handle-repaint methods to change how they draw themselves (look at mcclim/gadgets.lisp and mcclim/Looks/pixie.lisp to see how this is done), or go a little further and define a frame manager to make your gadget subclasses the default choices.

Ideally, the gadget repaint functions ought to be refactored someday into separate background and foreground/label pieces with a style parameter, so that it's easier to customize them without duplicating code.