To install a Barquee theme, double click the .barqueetheme file in the Finder.

Want to give Barquee a more personal touch? You can by making your own theme, all it takes a image-editing application (like Photoshop) and some time.

To see how a Barquee theme file works, right click a .barqueetheme document and select "Show Package Contents". You could choose one of the above themes as an example, or you could use the version inside Barquee's own Resouces folder. Go into the "Contents" folder. You'll see two items: Info.plist and Resources. All the images for the theme are included in the Resources folder, and information such as the theme name, background color, and version are in the .plist file. We'll get back to that in a minute.

Open the Resources folder. The contents should look familiar. As you can see, as of Barquee 1.2, a theme consists of 15 files:

Now you may be wondering, "what's a mask?" Good question! A mask is an image with the same dimensions as its accompanying widget and tells Barquee what part of the image the text should be excluded from. So, for example, if you open the LeftCap and LeftCapMask images, you'll notice that the LeftCap is mostly transparent-- it's only an outline of the edge. Why, then, doesn't the scrolling text appear to the left of the cap as it does on the right? That's where the mask comes in. Notice that in the mask file, there is black everywhere the scrolling text and theme background should NOT appear and transparency everywhere else. If you make a theme with rounded or non-vertical caps, you'll need to use the masking feature to keep the text from drawing outside the edges your theme. (Some of you may wonder why use a separate mask at all when tiffs natively support their own masks-- remember that we are masking the text here, not the image itself.. this allows us to use the tiffs own masking for transparency). Theme widgets can be any width but must be 22 pixels high. Remember you can mask off any vertical space you don't use, and the caps themselves support transparency so you can show the underlying menubar pattern anywhere. There is, however, one caveat: Buttons and their associated Mask and Hilite images must have the same dimensions or you will notice some distortion. To get the hang of how different themes use masking and if you'll need it, take a look at the insides of some of the theme files above.

Open the Info.plist file (if you don't have the developer's tools installed you can use TextEdit). There are a few values you will need to customize: You'll notice that the APScrubberColor and APBackgroundColor are actually comprised of 4 colors- Alpha, Red, Green, and Blue. These values are all percentages (0.0-1.0).

That's it! To test the theme, copy it to your ~/Library/Application Support/Barquee/ folder and restart Barquee. If you'd like to see your theme here, drop us a line. Good luck!