[ubuntu-art] Theme engines

[Andrea Cimitan]

2008/8/11 Who <mailforwho at googlemail.com>:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 5:29 PM, George Kendros
> <georgekendros2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm new to this list, but I was just wondering what consideration was being
>> given to different theme engines and if any development is being put into a
>> specific theme engine?
>>
>> I was just wondering because I was looking at the official page of the
>> Nodoka engine and was pretty impressed with the direction it was taking.
>> Here is a link to the page;
>> https://fedorahosted.org/nodoka/wiki/0.8.x_Brainstorm . Of specific interest
>> is the 'Modern' screenshot. I think a theme based on that engine (when that
>> engine comes to fruition) could be really great.
>
> Complete, new, well maintained theme engines that are packaged for
> Ubuntu are not common. The problem with making a theme that relies on
> a newer engine is likely to be finding a maintainer for the code and
> someone to keep the new engine in Universe and up-to-date. For this
> reason there are people on this list that would encourage you to
> either:
>
>  - Be the maintainer of the theme in Ubuntu if you want to use it -
> this involves managing bugreports, etc
>  - Use a theme for which there is already a maintainer
>  - ask the designers of the new engine if they want to maintain it in
> Ubuntu (obviously, to them the news that someone wants to make a great
> theme based on it that would also be packaged in Universe or even Main
> could be a big incentive here...)
>
> In the case of Nodoka I don't know whether there is already someone
> pushing this into Ubuntu - sorry.
>
> There are people on this list that know more about this than I do, but
> I understand that (at least when Nodoka was first released) it was
> largely based on Murrine (which _will_ be packaged for Int. Ib. ) and
> that you could achieve the same look with both. This looks like it
> might no longer be true... I dunno... Andrea Cimitan, who develops
> Murrine might be able to answer to this part.
>
> Does that help?
>
> Who
>
Yeah the first releases of "nodoka" (till 0.6.x) were more like a text
replacement of "murrine" with "nodoka" and some fixed options (in fact
its look is very close to some custom murrine themes which uses those
options), the 0.8.x branch, from what I've seen, have some code also
from clearlooks, that permits more flexibility in the style (that
means having custom styles by just adding a drawing style.c file
without forking the engine).
I've added that code in murrine in december 2007, in fact the RGBA
drawing code is separated into a new file.

A similar look also to the MODERN (nodoka's) could be available using
the development release of murrine and customizing the gradients in
the gtkrc without having to hack on the engine code. The difference
you'll get is in the edges of the widgets: in those nodoka's mockups
they use a gradient (it is very easy to implement, maybe 20 lines of
code). Unfortunately, even if they looks good on that screenshot, they
seems from my tests (since in the past I've hacked also with similar
looks) to have problems with complex applications (like firefox etc
etc) which uses a lot of buttons, widgets etc etc and those gradients
felt a bit out of place. It is an opinion of course. Another
difference is in the shadows (frame shadow in, out, etched), which
uses brighter and darker colors: this is an hack, because gtk+ does
not give the ability to change bg[NORMAL] for those widgets, so they
should have the same color of the rest of the window.

Another little consideration, seeing both murrine and clearlooks
ability to easily add styles, instead working on hacking and forking
engines is much better to open gimp/inkscape and work on mockups of
the "widget factory", showing the desidered look. Implementing that
look in a engine will be really easy for a gtk+ engine hacker / cairo
"guru" :)

-- 
Andrea Cimitan - http://www.cimitan.com