White tie, can we have the 3D look of items in 2.5x as in 2.99

On a slightly different track then White Tie. I find selection in the CC lanes to be off putting. If you have 12 track colours e.g., its a bit hard to see whats going on. Would it be possible that CC lanes don't get selected, or would that foul up future changes, or not fit in with current thinking. Just a thought.

The OP asks the question Can we have the 3D items look of items in 2.5 as in 2.99 and somewhere along the line it gets turned into Can we have the look of 2.5 in 2.99 To which the answer is most assuredly yes you can. You can have the items just a tiny little bit 3D so you would hardly notice or you can have them grossly deformed, you can have a gradient or a pattern, You can have a picture of the Queen of you are patriotic, and you could have any of those things in the transparency of your liking. You can also do a whole lot of other interesting things to do with spacing, but you don't have to do any of them and you don't have to accept the 3D theme either. If it really is perceived to be much a problem the simple answer is to ship it with a flat theme and a 3D theme; actually the same theme, but with flat items. Whether this will prevent Protools engineers from laughing I have my doubts, but I don't care either. People often scoff at stuff they don't understand. It's a fair to comment on looking at a gui for long periods of time. There are plenty of flat themes I can't look at for more than ten minutes, and only a few I can work with for several hours at a time. However it would be quite wrong for me to suggest my preferences can be assumed to be good for everyone. The same would go for any so called professional, their view is valid but no more valid than mine, not even when they have a commercial license I believe This kind of argument has been raised time and again, but so far the protagonists have failed to produce a theme that will please everyone - not even a mock-up. Making someone else responsible for such a task would be setting them up to fail. How many times does it have to be said that it can't be done - because people like different things. That is why Reaper is themeable One of the things i like so much about the Reaper ethos is that they are interested in what we all think about the software but I don't ever remember anyone from Cockos asking for advice on a marketing strategy. I don't know where people get the absurd idea they need help with this :D

OTOH when someone says stuff like drillbit, I get all "Yeeea", "Yeeee", "right"! :) Reaper should have a look of it`s own. I didn`t mention what my favourite themes were: my personal default mock up with Windows default colours [looks Atarish...], and Unempty Dark theme for fanciness. ;) Cheers!

Personally i find the new default theme butt ugly and way too distracting That being said i'm almost certain most users would find my theme butt ugly and way too distracting The fact of the matter is that Reapers GUI is themeable and that should pretty much cover any of those arguements The usefulness of shadows on items beyond "Eye candy" is totally lost on me and i have seen or heard nothing that at this moment would convince me otherwise The problem as i see it at the moment is that Reapers GUI is very much a half way effort to do things right and to achieve nirvana it will have to have as much time spent on it by the devs as they would spend on making the audio/MIDI nirvana we all want. Take for instance one simple new addition to the GUI engine OK The blend modes on the loop selector This is less useful than the old method unless you have a blend mode for Odd/Even tracks Item background Item background selected Item waveform Item waveform selected And so on and so on because at the moment if i have a grey item background and orange waveform i can set it up so the waveform is red inside the loop which is great but what also happens the grey item background gets darkened not lightened Which would be more useful Now having speeled all that guff (And my stance on dev time being spent on the GUI engine is very well known and just in case you dont know i think it is a total waste of effort) i dont really see where Reaper is currently headed GUI wise ? It seems very much that it is lost in this half way position of "Do we go all the way with this and spend many many man hours getting it right" or "Do we just add in what is needed to make the new default theme look how WT wants it to look" It's a puzzler for me to be honest and i have to agree totally with DUX view that whenever i see an update and it is GUI this GUI that it is a total bubble burster for me. I have never asked once for an FR as far as i can remember and maybe someone can do a search and prove me wrong hahahahaha but there are so many things in Reaper that need fixing and bringin up to spec that it's a little disconcerting to see so much work being done on the GUI engine. NAS

so you guys don't give a rat's ass how fast the GUI redraws? (lately zooming has gotten much faster if I can believe what I've heard) Give me a break, the GUI needs work as much as the next item in the todo list, if you can't see that, get back to using windows 3.11 (seeing the content of a window when you drag it? who needs that right?) item shadows, well it could be anything you want, doesn't need to be a shadow, it doesn't need to look 3d, but themers now have an option to do so. But I'm sure you guys would love to see reaper turn into a command line daw. Yes reaper should have it's own look, bundling themes that look like PT, logic, live ... would only serve to make reaper look like the poor kid who wanted to be like the big boys. ----- anyway this thread has drifted far enough from the OP's question, to which I'd reply why would you need the new features of 3.x in 2.x when all you need to do is upgrade to the new version?

Good point Brice, although you`ve taken it to an extreme with the command line remarks :). I was happy to see faster rendering, as those are the only GUI updates I really like to see - optimisations for speed and smoothness of the overall feeling ;). There are still too many inconsistencies and simply out of sync and precision stuff in Reaper`s GUI, so those are the points that should be taken care of, as soon as possible, actually. But auto-muting of the parts while moving them around seems much more important to me :). God it`s annoying... aaargh. As far as the themes go, there are so many nice themes for everyone`s taste right now, that all I can think of when I see the user`s negative comments about it is - nitpickers [grump]... there are so many more important things to do right now... But all in all, I think last few GUI updates weren`t so bad. On the contrary. I was finally able to tweak my own theme just the way I like it :). Happy holidays! Cheers!