Pimp My Camino

Camino 1.6 has been released, and with it comes some changes on how themes work. The following will elaborate on what those changes are, and what they mean for users.

Camino

Some changes have been made to both Camino’s file names and extensions.

Newer changes include:
1) File extensions have been standardized as .tiff. This means that all icons with the extension .tif will have to be changed to .tiff.
2) historyicon.tif has been changed to history_icon.tiff (the small history icon)
3) Navigation.tiff has been changed to General.tiff (the prefpane icon)

Older changes include:
4) popup-blocked.png has become popup_blocked_icon.tiff
5) Installing prefpane icons into Camino’s main Resources directory no longer affects the prefpane icons. You must now go into each individual prefpane’s Resources to change the icon.

In addition, there are some new icons:
6) tab_loading.tiff displays on a tab as a loading indicator only while a site is loading in that tab. Once it is loaded, the usual globe_ico.tiff is displayed.
7) hidemanager.tiff displays in the navigation toolbar when you are in the bookmark manager (this is an older change, but I thought I would mention it anyway).

Camino Theme Renamer will take care of changes 1-4 for you. Change 5, however, will require you to go in manually and change the prefpane icons. We’ve had a few people ask about how to do this, so here’s a little walkthrough:

1) Right-click on Camino and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu.
2) Navigate to Contents/PreferencePanes.
3) Right-click on a .prefPane and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu.
4) Navigate to Contents/Resources.
5) Replace the .tiff file with an icon of your choosing (make sure the file name is the same). The .tiff file is the prefpane icon you see in Camino’s preferences.
6) Repeat steps 3-5 for any other .prefPane icons you wish to change.

CaminIcon

Renamed themes will no longer be accurately displayed by CaminIcon. This is because CaminIcon’s matrix looks for specific file names to display, and at the moment it is looking for file names in versions of Camino before 1.6. However, although it will not accurately display the icons, it should still install them correctly.

One thing that should be noted is that when installing themes, CaminIcon uses Camino’s default as a template. This means that if any icons are missing from your theme, they will be taken from Camino’s default theme. Since CaminIcon is currently programmed to look for file names from versions of Camino before 1.6, I am unsure as to how this will affect theme installations.

Reinhold Penner, the developer of CaminIcon, is currently quite busy, so it is unclear when CaminIcon will be updated.

CaminoKnight

CaminoKnight should still install renamed themes properly like CaminIcon.

UnifyCamino

UnifyCamino uses a different method of implementing themes, overlaying icons without actually replacing any of Camino’s resources. As such, it has been found that it will still properly use themes without renaming the extensions, although file names still need to be changed. However it is still recommended to use Camino Theme Renamer before installing any themes on Camino 1.6 or later.

PimpMyCamino

PimpMyCamino will eventually get around to renaming and repackaging its themes, but when this will happen is unclear, as the prospect of doing so is not very exciting. In the meantime, this post is meant to enable users to rename themes themselves for Camino 1.6.