[ubuntu-art] Dust-Based theme

[Dylan McCall]

>> It is professional, yet modern looking, yet doesn't give the vibe that
>> we were copying anyone else. Can this be used with Metacity? If so, we
>> have a winner. :)
>>
>> Smartboy
>
> To me it is clone of Mac's interface with darker colors. So we are
> coping somebody here. One more thing. I think that this is only a mockup
> because with current programs (metacity, emerald) it is near impossible
> to make a highlight that is in the title and continues in the menubar.
> I've wanted to do this in New Wave but with no success.
>
> That is just personal opinion. If some better software has appeared
> meanwhile then I'll be very happy to see this as default in Ubuntu.
>
>
> Anton

But in this case, I think the continuing highlight can be killed
without too much of a loss; the theme generally looks the same with or
without a title bar already. Even New Wave looks all right without the
shadow effect, as it's a convenient way to divide two kinds of
windows. A nice fix to the gradient there would be 'just' making it
sharper, doing the whole curve with the window title bar and having
the menu bar a solid colour. It is a subtle enough gradient that the
change may work fine.

For now a theme like New Wave is not going to work perfectly in action
because of what you mention. There are rumblings about of the Metacity
team devising a new, less bizarre way for doing window themes with two
proposed possibilities being "leave it to GTK" and "use SVGs" -- the
first one is quite exciting.
There is the small border around the title and menu. It should
probably be scrapped. We cannot assume all menu bars to be at the tops
of windows, and without that being the case the lines look bizarre.

The little window glow of Kin continues to please me. Of course,
impossible without Emerald, and one cannot stress enough how futile
Emerald is. Maybe a dark inner border with a shiny outer border in
Metacity would give a close enough effect.

I am a bit hesitant about people jumping on the Firefox end of that
mockup. As is well known, Firefox uses its own theme engine. (Although
FF 3 tries valiantly to look like GTK). This mockup should really be
of a properly GTK-powered program, such as the About Me program or of
Nautilus. Also as ismentioned somewhere, the author says that the
Firefox mockup is kind of a different thought from the rest of the
Dust theme. In contrast to the other stuff, it is busy and fiddly.

Again for the "looks like Mac" argument, please look at these
screenshots and find One Thing that actually, truthfully looks like it
is yanked from MacOS aside from "has buttons":
http://media.arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.media/finder-sidebar.png
http://www.apertureprofessional.com/articleimages/auto_upload/7e97c089dfa50b5f1f316b7d91d3ae60/iphoto08.jpeg

Bye,
-Dylan