Apr 05 2013

SharePoint Color Palette Tool

Category: Microsoft,SharePoint,SharePoint 2013,Technology,User Experience — Kamlesh @ 11:18 am

Good News for SharePoint Designers!  Microsoft recently released SharePoint Color Palette Tool,which can be freely downloaded from this Microsoft Official Download Page.  This tool will come handy to pick up right color codes and see the preview, before you start applying the CSS to your actual SharePoint site.  The default colors shown as part of this tool are more related to SharePoint 2013 User Interface.

SharePoint 2013 Color Palette Tool

Screenshot of SharePoint Color Palette Tool (Click to enlarge)

To install/work with this tool, you need not require SharePoint server installation.  However, the system should have .NET Framework 4.5 and Internet Explorer 8 or higher browser.

Download: SharePointColorPaletteTool_Setup.msi (1.14 MB)

Mar 07 2013

“This theme can’t be applied to the desktop” error on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Category: User Experience,Virtualization,Windows Server 2008 — Kamlesh @ 11:10 pm

Recently I built a Hyper-V Guest with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 for SharePoint 2010.  To bring the desktop client OS capabilities, I enabled Desktop Experience feature from Server Manager.

Desktop Experience Feature in Server Manager of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

I downloaded some themes online from Microsoft website.  When I double clicked on the .theme file to load, it gave me “This theme can’t be applied to the desktop” error and greyed out the theme name on the same screen.

This theme can't be applied to the desktop. Try clicking a different theme.

I used the following troubleshooting steps to resolve this problem:

  • As many of us are into Windows 8 world, I thought the choosen theme file is only compatible with Windows 8/Windows Server 2012.  So, I went back to Microsoft Windows Themes download website, and selected “Compatible with Windows 7″ option at left side categories menu.  However, this didn’t help me.  I got the same error.
  • Verified if there is anything related to “Desktop Feature” / “Themes” in the Windows Services.  I noticed that, in my case, the Themes service set was “Disabled”.  I changed its settings to “Automatic” and started it. But this didn’t help me either.  (below screen shot is after changing the status and starting the service).

Themes Service needs to be started

  • As this was a Virtual Client OS, to save some troubleshooting time, I didn’t mind trying a reboot! After reboot, the Themes started working :-)

In case if you are able to fix this problem without rebooting, then please do share your comments.

 

Jan 26 2010

Running Windows 3.1 in Browser!

Category: JavaScript,User Experience,Web Design,Windows — Kamlesh @ 6:23 pm

Michaelv.org is coded in JavaScript and strict XHTML 1.0, with AJAX functionality provided

through PHP. It has been tested for compatibility in Firefox and IE. Firefox 2 or 3 is highly recommended, but the site is almost entirely functional in IE 6,7, or 8. Media Player does not work in IE as IE lacks the ability to dynamically instantiate <OBJECT>.

The file system is stored in SQL and is dynamic. File creation, renaming, deletion, reading, and writing can all be accomplished in real-time and with persistent results. However, for obvious reasons, visitors are not able to make changes to the file system in any way.

The goal of this site is not to create an entirely complete mirror image of Windows 3.1, but rather keep the spirit and omit features when they are not justified by an effort to usability ratio. For example, Notepad lacks a find and replace feature because it is not worth the effort. Where feat

ures do exist, every effort is made to present them in exactly the manner that they existed in Windows 3.1.

The developer has also endeavored to put plenty of features in which are not readily apparent, hopefully making the site a fun and long-lasting process of experimentation and discovery. For example, try pressing the keystroke for full screen mode in MS-DOS Prompt.

Disclaimer: The above post is extracted from Main -> Readme section of www.michaelv.org