[ubuntu-art] New Wave Theme

[Who]

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 8:07 PM, Anton Kerezov <ankere at gmail.com> wrote:
> В 20:36 +0200 на 03.05.2008 (сб), François Degrave написа:
>  >
>  >         > like Ubuntu to look like in the (near) future:
>  >         > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/NewWave
>  >
>  > Hi Anton!
>  >
>  > Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, my skills for theme
>  > creation are really limited - in fact, I never created one, and I'm
>  > only able to make pretty images like the one you have seen. However,
>  > feel free to create and lead a new theme team if you feel like it. Of
Snip
>  Unfortunately I have to admit that I don't have a slightest idea of how
>  to code a theme but I do know to code in C so I can learn it over time.
>  Is there a theme we will base New Wave or we will have to make a new
>  theme engine like clearlooks, murrine and aurora? I think the theme we
>  are trying to make is very close to clearlooks so we can make a fork and
>  implement our own theme style (the buttons shape & color, the other
>  widgets).
>
>  I would like to ask the ppl from the list if they could help with the
>  decision on the engine problem (esp. Troy, and Who).
>

Well, I would say a few things first:
The energy that is required to generate a new theme engine is pretty
high. Before you start I would be sure that the style you are aiming
for is not available from one of the newer engines (esp. Murrine -
which is very configurable and also supports transparency as that
theme requires).
Before doing ANY work on a new style like that, get some more design
done - the single image isn't really enough to know how the theme is
going to hold together, what is going to make it *work* as a theme.
This sort of area is where Troy's advice is great, and there are
certainly many others on the list more able to comment on design
theory than me!

Techincally, it looks like you could get a lot of what you want with
Murrine and a custom metacity. If you know a lot of C and have some
time to get to grips with a theme engine, tweaking it as you like
should be possible: but like I say - be sure you know where you're
going... Get  a .gtkrc that gets a theme engine as close as possible
to your desired look before you start hacking. Then do some review of
the design before you go too far: is it usable? Does it feel nice to
use? Etc. Then you can move forward into making the engine do a bit
more.

On the other hand, braver people than I would use the pixbuff engine:
It allows you to define all the elements of a theme with images.
Performance isn't crazy-good, but it isn't crazy-bad either. To my
knowledge, pixbuf isn't doing alpha yet (on the other hand - you could
well find during your usability testing that alpha isn't the way you
really want to take things.). With pixbuff the key is to look at an
existing theme, and build your one from there.

As far as usability testing goes, pixbuf can be a good way to beta
test styles: A single GTKRC can use multiple engines (this isn't
advisable in a final theme, as you take a memory hit...) so if, for
example, clearlooks did everything except the scrollbars the way you
wanted you could test JUST the scrollbars using images and the pixbuff
engine, using clearlooks for all else. Then, if you really like it,
patch clearlooks to get what you want. If your code is good and your
change is optional, you might be able to get your code upstream to be
able to avoid having to maintain a branch...

That's a bit of a theming braindump - hope it makes sense.

You can use gtkperf to benchmark themes (in a fairly basic way)

Happy design.
Who