You know the times are changing when HBO is trying to ride a web browser wave. On Wednesday, the network will unveil a new campaign centering on a custom theme it developed to support its new drama series, Rome. The theme will be splashed in The New York Times and other high-profile media outlets.
I’m surprised it took this long for companies to notice that we’ve baked such a viral feature right into the browser. Steve, tell them to get with it! Now who’s going to make a slick Harry Potter theme?
Update: Asa Dotzler says Warner Bros. made a theme for Batman Begins.
August 15th, 2005 at 5:44 pm
I am working on it. It’s the schmutz that’s slowing me down.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
Themes are a great feature no doubt, but I wonder about their potential without a theme builder and official skinning tutorials/documentation. I’ve tried to build numerous themes, reach the point where I’ve completed the basics, but then hit a brick wall when it comes to something expectingly simple like getting rounded edges on the location bar, for example. It’s a really time-consuming, trial-and-error process which just isn’t worth the effort atm, considering that skin designers generally have nothing to gain from creating a theme (unless it becomes a huge success and brings them exposure).
The Batman Begins theme is nice (first decent dark theme), and together with the Rome theme will hopefully launch a new interest in Firefox themes across the skinning community, but that adoption depends almost entirely on the level of difficulty involved. You need to design the skin and then still have technical (css/xml) knowledge which most gui designers don’t have unfortunately.
August 16th, 2005 at 10:20 am
I started working on putting together some decent themeing documentation on the wiki (with hopes that it would rally some support that way) but even that seems to be relatively dead. The only person that has added anything to it besides myself in months fixed a spelling error (not that fixing my spelling isn’t apreciated).
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Theme_development
Though I’m somewhat opposed to wiki’s as a source of documentation I think it would be a great place to get ideas hashed out for a more stable documentation release.
Getting this really full and detailed won’t be hard, it will just take time, and more than just myself working on it. soo…. go do it :)
August 16th, 2005 at 10:52 am
(and by go do it… I mean visitors of this site… and anyone else that has 10- 15 minutes of free time to add some content and flesh out the barebones)
August 16th, 2005 at 8:56 pm
I would love to see a (NFL) Dallas Cowboy theme. I’d have to use it and would even be willing to pay for it. If it’s good that is.
August 18th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
I tried installing the Rome theme that actually appeared on the HBO site today on Thursday…But, this theme is not scaled correctly, It does not appear completely in my firefox browser version 1.0.6…The Batman theme works and looks great!!!
August 18th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
hmmm…
well it installed fine for me, unfortunantly… there are other problems… mostly by design
you can check out what I mean here >
http://www.bytecave.net/anders/images/rome_theme_main.png
for a screenshot.
August 19th, 2005 at 6:35 pm
I don’t like the color scheme, but, I wonder why when I downloaded the theme it did not scale correctly??…I have a 17 inch screen, would that make a difference?..I don’t even get the red colors showing up in my sidebar..the windows colors still remained…It is so odd because i did not have problems with the Batman theme…
September 1st, 2005 at 10:18 am
What an awful theme!