Re: [Tile-dev] Heads up -- upcoming changes

[Joe E. <jen...@fl...>]

Jeff Hobbs wrote:

> Just going through the demos again, aside from the scrollbars,
> I don't see much improvement over a mix of Default and
> Revitalized.  The clipped corners seems ok for some things
> (like the entry), but the button looks ill-defined.  Of the
> three, here are my unix prefs (and maybe now is the time to
> mix/match the "best" default): [...]

Sounds reasonable, but we should also consider what the
rest of the desktop looks like.

The "Clam" theme was designed to match (what was at the time)
the default XFCE theme, and "default" is designed to match the
Gnome "Simple" theme.  "Clam" is also a reasonable, though not 
great, match for ClearLooks.  Similarly "default" is a reasonable 
match for most members of the Mist family.

Another design goal for the "default" theme is that it should
be as plain and simple as possible; no graphical elements should
clash with anything else on the desktop.  "default" doesn't need
to be the default theme on X11, but the root theme does need to
be clean and featureless (no grips, no fancy borders, etc.)

I'm working -- slowly -- on themes that will match BlueCurve,
Galaxy, and a couple of the standard KDE themes.  Work in progress
in the DARCS repository here:

    <URL: http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/repos/themebag >

[ As an aside to the Windows and OSX users -- "Clam" et al. really
  need to be seen under X11.  Due to numerous small glitches
  in Tk's Xlib emulation layer that just aren't worth working
  around right now, Clam looks like utter crap on Windows
  and the Mac. ]

> > >>> The "Step", "Clam", and possibly "Classic" themes
> > >>> are also going away, possibly to return as separate loadable
> > >>> extensions.
>
> Will this save us lots of code?

In the end, not a whole lot, but it will save a lot of
grunt-work in the meantime if we can reduce the number
of themes to be maintained moving forward.  If we're going
to support all the different L&F that I'd like to support,
I think a different approach is needed (see themebag,
above -- the basic idea is to make it easier to assemble
a theme out of a large stock collection of predefined
graphical elements).


--Joe English

  jen...@fl...