Re: GEP-2 (metathemer)

[Lars Weber <lars brokenbits de>]

Calum Benson <calum benson sun com> wrote:
> I have my own views on this, but the GEP presumably isn't the place to
> discuss such matters :)  (FWIW, though, I did try fleshing out a
> prototype design and it actually ended up looking not too different from
> the one Lars proposed a while back).

Just in case this might be of use to anyone the glade file I used for my
mockups is now available online under the following address:

  http://brokenbits.de/lars/cruft/meta-theme.glade

Only two or three days ago I also made the following two (small) changes
to the dialog:

 o Moved the `Revert' and `Save as' buttons to the button bar.

   This is more correct HIG-wise as the buttons relate to both
   notebook-pages and not only the second.

 o Moved the preview area and buttons on the second page so that they are
   now below the list of settings.

   The two advantages of this are:

     a) There is now a little bit more space in the settings-list to
        describe what a given setting does.

     b) The preview area is also larger which is especially useful for
        previews like the one for gtk or for the window-decoration.

  http://brokenbits.de/lars/cruft/meta-theme2-select.png
  http://brokenbits.de/lars/cruft/meta-theme2-edit.png

[ Another thing I changed is the ordering of the `Add' and `Remove'
buttons of both lists so that the remove button comes first... however I
did these mostly out of curiosity and not because I think it's necessarily
the right thing. ]

Finally I also created a few simple mockups of different preview types:

  http://brokenbits.de/lars/cruft/meta-theme2-preview.png

These are also not really thought through, however.  The loudness-control
of the sound-preview for example seems a little bit misguided as sounds
would use the current settings when played for real events, too.

> I think my main concern is about the 'extensibility' aspect... allowing
> a theme to specify arbitrary(ish) Gconf pairs is a neat idea and easy
> enough to design a UI for, but unfortunately in the real world most apps
> aren't themeable via GConf... right now for a Mozilla theme change to
> take effect, for example, you have to execute a bit of javascript and
> restart the whole application!  Maybe people will be prepared to patch
> GNOME versions of such apps to work with GConf until they support native
> toolkit theming better (if they ever do), but I'm not holding my
> breath...

Maybe another option would be to use something like a helper script that
takes the appropriate settings from gconf and applies them for non-native
applications.  Such a script (or sub-routine/whatever) could then
theoretically also pop up a message-box informing the user that some of
the changed settings only take effect after the target-appliaction has
been restarted... the downside of such a dialog would be that it would
become an annoyance pretty fast, however.

Regards,
Lars