[ubuntu-art] RFC: Ubuntu 6.06 Improvement Review

[Frank Schoep]

Hello everyone,

I'm having trouble finding time to do Ubuntu related things lately due to 
overtime, but I've managed to put in some hours over the past two weeks. I've 
got a lot of ideas and suggestions I want to vent but I'm going to have to 
find a lot more time before I can present them in a professional way.

These past two weeks I started working on a document that is now temporarily 
called "Ubuntu 6.06 Improvement Review".

My initial goal was to make a statement that "artwork is more than a GTK theme 
and a bootsplash image". I've tried to combine artwork, consistency and 
usability into a single review of the operating system. All points of 
improvement can be used as a checklist for Edgy, to see where we need to 
invest time and refine things.

In the little time I had, I managed to review the boot-up screen, local login 
and remote login. You can download a work-in-progress PDF at this TinyURL:
http://tinyurl.com/s4crn

A direct link (spanning lines, with spaces in the filename):
http://www.ffnn.nl/media/external/ubuntu/dapperimprovement/Ubuntu 6.06 
Improvement Review.pdf

I'm asking for criticism and comments, along with the question of it being 
worth continuing this effort.

It is unfortunate that I didn't want to deviate from the chronological order 
while writing the review, because reviewing all default applications is going 
to be tremendously interesting and will result in a list of inconsistencies 
amongst the bundled applications.

Having this list would then make it possible to make Ubuntu feel less like a 
bunch of applications thrown together to put it in a harsh way. For instance, 
something I've been involved with is creating a Human theme for Firefox, 
because it brings its own incompatible icons and colors by default. This is a 
case where artwork and the concept of a "desktop theme" crosses the GTK  
boundary.

I'm looking forward to receiving your comments. Keep in mind that the document 
isn't intended for public release yet, isn't finished and the page layout 
hasn't got any love yet, but it's the best I can show you right now.

Thanks for reading.

With kind regards,

Frank Schoep