The main idea of the sphere theme is based on observations of the colors in nature: the transitions from light to dark and vice versa aren`t based on just adding white or black colors. The colors mostly have some yellow parts in it when going to white and blue when going to black.
This effect has been noted quiet early in chromatics (e.g. divition of the color wheel in bright/dark and warm/cold). The main purpose was to implement this effect into Sphere.
Additionally to that basis the sphere theme implements many new features which work for you in the background. Two of them are worth mentioning here: the navigation and tooltips.
As the menu is not static but animated I can`t fully describe the effect here. Just try it out. When you hover the navbar with the mouse the menu is softly expanded downward, overlaying the header image in a semi-transparent layer. The whole menu is built as a site map, so your visitors are able to directly go to any part of your site. Also every menu entry softly changes from the inactive to the active state.
The tooltips is another great feature of the sphere theme. When you hover a link in the main content, a tooltip will pop up showing the link target (URL) and a small description in a semitransparent layer.
Here are some key features of "Sphere Theme":
· Add your own custom header images (up to 10).
· Add your own custom footer images (up to 10).
· Custom Colors available for many parts of the layout (body, footer, navbar, content, ...).
· The coolest menu ever implemented for RapidWeaver.
· Tooltips.
· Greybox included.
· 6 Font Families.
· 3 Sidebar positions: left/right/hide.
· 4 different content widths.
· 5 body background overlays.
· Bottom Fades for a great effect.
· Many navbar item widths.
· Automatic Image Resizing.
Requirements:
· RapidWeaver 3.6 or later
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Exchanged greybox with mediabox.
· Font Size Variation added.
· Navbar Font Family Variation added.
· Navbar letter spacing added for better readability.
· Header Background Color Added to be used if you don`t want to use header images.
· Added a style variation to remove the huge bottom padding (if you don`t use a footer image or fading).
· Added a style variation to use a split navigation (subitems in sidebar).
· You can now enable/disable the menu drop down.
· Added a first stylesheet for iPhone/iPod Touch (work in progress) which corrects some minor problems.
· Corrected a bug with the automatic image resize option.
· Fixed the navbar expanding height in IE7 (IE6 still needs a manually adjusted value if you need it).
· Fixed some errors so the theme`s CSS and HTML code does validate (with option CSS3, 2 moz/webkit rules won`t validate).
· Changed the animation speed of the drop down menu, so your site seems to be a little bit more responsive.
