Metal Lion - About Us
A brief history of Metal Lion themes.
Welcome
to the new Metal Lion website for
Themes and
Extensions for the Firefox web browser. All publicly available Metal
Lion themes are shown on the links above.
As
previously stated, the Metal Lion - Blue Moonlight Vista theme is now
no
longer available...but may return. However, since originally writing
this, I have received a number of requests to keep the BMV Slideshow on
the site, so it will soon return.
For those of
you that do not know the history of the Metal Lion
theme range, it is simply this. In addition to public themes for
Firefox, I also make non-public themes as well,. Indeed my first theme,
the very popular Metal Lion 2, which was available to the public for 3
months (I'll post a screenshot or two of it sometime) then
went on to become a non public theme. Public themes followed, in the
form of the 3 Metal Lion iCes, Aluminium Kai 2 and the extremely
popular #1 theme, Metal Lion Vista . I say 'popular', because I figure
when you have a theme being downloaded at in excess of 400,000
downloads per week, you must be doing something right. A
number of non-public themes were also created in this period (February
2006 - January 2007)
In around March 2007, I
designed the theme, Blue Moonlight Vista and, as usual with my work,
all the icons and graphics were designed, created, made by myself and
obviously copyrighted to me. In my view, far too few theme authors do
this
these days and Firefox themes generally have stagnated somewhat, with
the same old icon sets being constantly recycled, again and again...and
again. However, I digress. I decided that rather than Blue Moonlight
Vista becoming, as originally intended, a non public theme, it would
instead be offered to any Firefox users who made a donation above a
certain level (£4.50) for a limited period of one year. I should add
that in that entire year, I did not receive one single objection to
that idea and that my BMV users turned out to be an exceptionally nice
bunch of people and it was a pleasure to converse with them and answer
their support questions. However, things move on and, as intended, it
became unavailable a year later.
In
September, 2007, the public theme, Metal Lion -300 was released, which
was a highly enjoyable theme to create and implemented many new ideas,
including the idea which was first started with Blue Moonlight Vista,
of making a dark theme with light coloured, and therefore readable,
menus and list backgrounds (seen in the Sidebar, etc.) It's
hard to believe that so obvious an improvement to functionality with
dark themes had not ever been done before! In addition to my usual
trademark progressmeter balls, this theme also features (only
because it looked good and people said it couldn't be done.) the first
almost fully transparent scrollbars.
April 2008,
saw the public release of Metal Lion - Andromeda, an experimental
concept theme for Firefox 3 users, which was based on the Firefox 3
default theme and not my usual Metal Lion code engine.
In
June 2008, this new website was ready and I will now be hosting all my
themes and extensions from here and not from the Mozilla Addons
site..probably. Since that date, the development and versioning of all
my existing themes for the various new Firefox versions has continued
and are always ready for your enjoyment. :)
I've
often noticed on many websites, that there is an 'About Me' section and
regarding all that, I would simply say this. I am from the UK and if
you really want to know 'about me', then just look at my themes.
All
the best,
Frank :)
Metal Lion 300 Customise Window Background.
Other Details
....other details will appear here, in due course. :)
Meanwhile, you may like to
enjoy the delights
of the Metal
Lion Music and Video Page
