[ubuntu-art] Concepts outside the scope of theming

[Boudhayan Gupta]

On Friday 24 April 2009 22:52:15 Smartboy wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_ at freenet.de> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > We have this new page in Incoming/Karmic:
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/UserInteraction
> >
> > This is all outside of the scope of theming and artwork in that it would
> > require rather deep technical changes. This means that even if
> > developers would run with it, it would be very unlikely to be ready for
> > Karmic. Experience suggests that nobody will do anything with it.
> >
> > I suggest we keep concepts of this kind outside of the current cycle's
> > Incoming directory.
> >
> > Should we outright discourage work of this kind? I think no, maybe
> > someday we will see something game-changing :)
> >
> > So I propose to create Incoming/Concepts for this page and similar to
> > follow.
> >
> >
> > dael99: Are you reading?
> >
> > Regarding a single panel, this has be left to the people at Canonical. I
> > doubt anyone can offer a new argument here.
> >
> > Regarding mixing titlebar and menubar, this idea comes up again and
> > again. Could work in some cases, but you have to deal with long
> > filenames in window titles  and also long menus, so it should be one or
> > 2 bars depending on the space required/offered.
> >
> > A short description and 1 or 2 mockups has never been enough to make
> > this happen.
> >
> >
> > --
> > Thorsten Wilms
> >
> > thorwil's design for free software:
> > http://thorwil.wordpress.com/
> >
> >
> > --
> > ubuntu-art mailing list
> > ubuntu-art at lists.ubuntu.com
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
>
> If we were to do the titlebar thing, it would require forking both GTK
> and Metacity, neither of which should we fork before their respective
> major releases get out of the way (Metacity in GNOME 3.0, and GTK
> 3.0). It would actually probably require us to modify apps themselves,
> not metacity, as the apps have to provide their own buttons for a
> window border. I think that this would be virtually impossible with
> GTK at the moment, even with modification.
>
> Smartboy

This is an architectural deficiency. The titlebars, buttons, and the entire UI 
is provided by the app. The window borders are provided by the Window Manager. 
If we were to unify the menu bar and the title bar, we'd have to re-write an 
entire Window Manager (not fork, re-write) to hook into the app, grab the 
elements of the menu-bar, and remove it from the app, then somehow convert the 
menu bar elements into WM buttons, and draw the window border. This will need 
to be separate for every toolkit, i.e, GTK and Qt, as they are not inter-API-
compatible.

This is not the job of the art team, its the job of developers, Of course, 
this is IMHO.

Regards,
Boudhayan Gupta