On Wed, 2005-02-16 at 17:57 +0000, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Its an improvement over bluecurve but not a quantum leap in themes. All
> the Gnome themes I have seen lack sex appeal and reinforce the view that
> its all very bland (which is okay for a corporate desktop but boring to
> everyone else).
I don't want a sexy, eye catching theme for my widgets, thanks. I want
widgets that fit together so well that the *overall look* of my UI is
absolutely slick. I want the overall 'feel' of everything I see to be
consistent, simple, and well put-together.
Apple has done this very well. Unfortunately, people seem to look at the
Mac UI and fixate on the 'symptoms' of its coolness ("Ooo! Shiny glassy
buttons and bright bright bluuue!"), instead of looking at the rules
that were followed and the consistency of design that make Aqua more
than the sum of its parts. Apple *uses* throbbing buttons and color to
present information, not necessarily because it looks cool.
What I would like to see is an effort at establishing a single unified
GNOME look and feel (metacity theme, gtk theme, iconset, cursor set,
panel setup) that would be a hard default across all distros. A few
well-chosen colour schemes for it, stop installing 3rd-party themes by
default, downplay the "themes" capplet (only shown if a gconf key is
set) and we have something that is hopefully identifiable as GNOME by my
mom looking at a screen shot. Let the people who care about themes
maintain and distribute their stuff amongst themselves. No other major
desktop, be it Windows or Mac, makes theming obvious to the average
user; Windows needs a patched uxtheme dll, Mac needs third party
software. That's a GOOD thing.
It's only once we've started treating the UI look as a real, planned
part of the GNOME Desktop's identity (instead of just a "skin" to be
changed on a whim) that we will be able to really do new things and wow
people. Once we get this right, we can add the fancy visual
embellishments as Composite, Damage, et al. mature.
Please, let's not try to compete with Apple on a widget-by-widget basis
until we have a better foundation to build on.
--
Gabriel Bauman
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