Re: 1.2 theme properties / 2.0 default theme

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com> writes:

> Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:
> 
> > I spent some time over the last few days working on an
> > look improvements for GTK+-1.2 for a couple of reasons:
> 
> Will this actually make it into the 1.2 series? It sounds like the
> kind of change I would have expected to be rejected for the stable
> series (though I definitely would like to see some improvement in time
> for GNOME 1.4).

I have mixed feelings whether it should go into GTK+-1.2
official.  On one hand I'm very opposed to adding new API or
large patches of any sort to GTK+-1.2 at this point, I think it
just causes maintanence problems, problems for users who have to
track the new versions, the potential for new bugs, and so forth.

On the other hand, GTK+-1.2 will be used for quite a while yet
and some of the default widget appearance is not only ugly, it
produces distinct useability problems. The immediate inspiration
for this work was a number of bug reports from people confused by
the checkbuttons in the Red Hat installer.

I was very careful with the patch to make it basically 100%
compatible, if not 100% clean, even with some of the horrible
hacks that existing themes do.

I think as long as we can encourage the proper use - that the
new entry points are used only in:

 - tarballs of themes that do appropriate checks in there
   configure.in

 - packages of themes that have the correct dependencies

Then there is no essential harm. But thats an if. 

We will be strongly encouraging people to upgrade to 1.2.9
anyways for other reasons so as long as it doesn't cause
instability, I don't really mind if people need to upgrade to use
the latest themes.

But basically, there is no decision yet, though one criterion for
this work is keeping it compatible enough to use for the Red Hat
GTK+ packages.
 
> > I don't know if this is the direction we want to go for the GTK+-2.0
> > default theme or if we want to go with something more radical.
> > Some mockups that came out of a discussion on this subject are at:
> > 
> >  http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gtk/2.0/ui/
> > 
> 
> I think you mean
> 
> http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gtk/ui/
> 
> I definitely dislike the dark gray arrows in the "Proposed" versions
> there, they are too out of place and too vague as UI elements.

Well, if you try the theme I posted, you'll see I went with black
there. I'm not completely happy with that either - I think the
arrows are rather to obtrusive, but the solution may be simply
to make them a bit smaller.
 
> > I'm fairly partial to the look of Garrett's mockup (which basically
> > became his Premier theme). But it has at least one major useability
> > issue - you can't tell whether widgets are focused or not.
> 
> I like Arlo's proposal except for that cyan color. It could be really
> sweet with a nice blue or something as the secondary color.

I don't want the default to be that pixmap heavy or in fact, that
non-bland.

The default theme needs to be:

 - Lightweight enough to work well over networks
 - Plain enough to stick around for years and not get tiresome
 - Somewhat distinctive (a GTK+ look), yet comfortable for people
   coming from other environments.
 - Attract`ive

A tall order...

Regards,
                                        Owen