[ubuntu-art] NewHuman feedback

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

Hi Kenneth and the rest of the list,

A thread with a descriptive title for once. Sorry about that.

I've now been dogfooding NewHuman on my Hardy box for a few days.
Here's what I've gathered:

Reactions
---------

 * My GMail in firefox does not look particularly good anymore. This
goes for most web pages with native widgets in them. I don't see any
easy solution to fix this in a dark theme. For Gmail atleast nudging
the base brown color a tad towards the lighter gray makes it more in
line with the GMail colors. Sorry to be so GMail centric, the same
idea should apply to many other websites.

 * The top line for the active window in the metacity theme is really
cool and a clever idea. Disregarding that it does however get a little
on my nerves when I read my window titles. I tried inversing the
gradient in the attached screenshot. Now let's see how that fares for
a few days :-)

 * As noted elsewhere the scrollbar handles are too hard to see for my olde eyes

 * Ditto for tabs in firefox. All the backgrounded tabs appear as a
black haze to me

 * The color of the menu highlight strikes me as especially pleasing
each time I open a menu. Love it.

 * Curved highlights on menu items appear out of place compared to the
über cool matte buttons

 Engine Ideas
--------
I have a few ideas that require changes in the engine. If I can get it
working without to much hazzle I'll look at the following (having
upstream as patch target - NOT a fork!):

 * Make tab highlights match the window border highlights

 * Generally highlights everywhere to match window decoration in some
way. Menu item, button hover, etc.

 * Any other ideas (that are likely to not require much work)?

Conclusions
----------
 * Solid start for venturing into dark-theme-territory.

 * I am still not convinced that all-out-dark themes are good on the
whole. They strain my eyes in the long run, and many web sites look
weird with dark controls. These are unfixable problems.

 * I believe that the New Wave guys are on to something. A hybrid
dark, gray, light theme with orange highlights can work very well.
This makes it possible to loose the dark controls in web pages.

Cheers,
Mikkel
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