Themes and colours

[Daniel Kasak <dkasak nusconsulting com au>]

Hi all.

I've been thinking about themes and colour recently, and I've had an
idea that may improve gtk apps' appearance and usability across a wide
range of themes.

I think there should be a list of colours that a theme designer can
specify as preferred application colours, that applications can then
fetch or specify.

We use colour coding in all of our applications to make various data
items stand out. A simple example is a treeview with outstanding
billing. Colouring is as follows:

< 30 days: black
< 60 days: blue
< 90 days: red

This works well with most themes, particularly the default clearlooks
theme. It doesn't work well at all with dark themes.

Now I realise that people frown upon overriding theme colours, and this
is probably a decent example of why, but on the other hand, colour
coding is incredibly useful for us, and this also demonstrates the worth
of my suggestion. With my suggestion, we could colour:

< 30 days: colour 1
< 60 days: colour 2
< 90 days: colour 3

 ... and we could rest easily knowing that the theme designers had
chosen sane values for each colour, and that things would look like, AND
we'd have our colour highlighting working.

Maybe instead of numbers, there could be different 'levels' of colour,
such as 'default', 'mild', 'highlight', 'critical', or something like
that.

For now, I'm writing a config window for users to manually set colour
levels exactly as above, and it works well ( but requires manual
configuration when you change themes ).

I think this suggestion is a relatively small and natural extension of
theming, and would allow for more visually appealing applications while
working around the problems that people have with overriding default
colours.

What say ye?

--
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989
email: dkasak nusconsulting com au
website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au