If you want to use an appbar, then you should also look for some icons with only few colors, the ones I use are stolen from KDE and are only 36x36.
If you want to use a background picture then reduce the colors of it, you can do that, for example, with The Gimp (Image - Indexed - and the choose as few colors as possible). The one I use, uses 7 colors (if you like it, take it back8bpp.xpm.gz)
(Looks a little bit strange on 16bpp displays, all images were taken from a 8bpp display, so sorry for color mismatches.)
First edit one of the look files that comes with AfterStep. I made the following entries, of course you can choose different colors:
### Look File color section
HiForeColor White
StdForeColor Grey70
StickyForeColor Black
MenuForeColor Grey70
HiBackColor mediumpurple4
StdBackColor Grey40
StickyBackColor Grey70
MenuBackColor mediumpurple4
MenuStippleColor Grey70
TextureTypes 0 0 0 0 0
ButtonTextureType 0
TextureMaxColors 1 1 1 1 1
ButtonMaxColors 1
##########################################################################
So all windows are colored with 5 colors (black, white, grey40, grey70 and mediumpurple4). Grey40 is used by the by the inactive windows for the frames, Grey70 for the text of the inactive windows, for the menu-text and the spaces between it's entries. mediumpurple4 is the color of the active window with White text. And Black is used for the text of sticky windows. All texture types are 0, that means, that there are no textures, only solid colors.
The menu would look like this:
So now we want the prevent that any icons will appear.
Put the following line at the end of your database file:
Style "*" NoIcon
Now we want the windows to disappear and to appear in the middle of the screen. Edit your look file:
IconBox 512 +384 -1 -1
You maybe ask yourself how you should access you minimized windows now. We will do this with the winlist. I did it the following way:
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Tasks list
#
*WinListBack Grey40
*WinListFore Grey70
*WinListFont -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
*WinListAction Click1 Iconify -1,Focus
*WinListAction Click2 Shade
*WinListAction Click3 Iconify
*WinListUseSkipList
*WinListUseIconNames
*WinListGeometry -0+0
# maxwidth for a vertical winlist or actual width for horizontal taskbar
*WinListMaxWidth 110
# down (vertical winlist) or across (horizontal titlebar) ?
*WinListOrientation down
*WinListRightJustify
*WinListNoAnchor
######
You see, again I used the same colors. This winlist file causes the winlist to appear at the top right corner (-0+0) and it grows to the bottom of the screen when windows are added. Ok, you also will get open windows into the winlist, but that's okay to me. Unfortunately there is a bug in the winlist, so it won't stay at it's place when the orientation is down.
That's how it looks:
Now you can play around with settings in the animate file to cause windows to be animated the way you like it.
Look through all your configuration files and change the colors to the ones used in your look file. For example, pager, forms and ident contains colors. But apart from that, you now got an AfterStep configuration that will work fine on 8bpp displays and leaves color-space for the applications.
As mentioned above, I use TkStep with icons from KDE, I also changed the icons of the TkDesk filebrowser and took some from KDE (the icons are the only thing I use from KDE ;-) ). This way, TkDesk uses much less colors than in standard configuration. I made a tar.gz of some of the icons, so you don't need the KDE stuff itself kicons.tar.gz.
Here is a set of icons for the wharf and the icons. They are stolen from Gnome (from a very early state). I converted them to xpm format (10 colors) and also tried to change colors within the icons, so that they all use, for example, the same black, white, grey, ... . It wasn't possible to reduce the colors to 10 for all icons together, but this way they look not that bad and IMHO much better then the 8bpp AS icons. If you don't use that much different icons, they will use about 80-100 colors all together. On the left you can see how the wharf look with that icons. The wharftile is ASBBlockSlate.xpm. And this is how the screen looks like:
Here you see also the new icon feature of AS 1.5pre9 where you can choose between the old look with a 64x64 tile behind the icons, and the new look without a tile behind them. This also works with transparent icons. Looks good, but I usually prefer the old look where all icons are same size.
Oh, I'm talking too much ;-) here are the icons, tarred and handy. If you use them all with 8bpp make sure to look into them to compare some more colors. I only did that with the ones I use right now. gnoicons.tar.gz