[ubuntu-art] Replacing GTKSeparator with copious chunks of empty space

[Dylan McCall]

Hi!


The new fad in UI design is white space. Even though GNOME has very
thick padding inside windows, we seem to be behind on this one :)

A big problem with GNOME's look right now, and this seems to be the case
no matter what theme one looks at, is the huge number of lines scattered
about the screen. They are used to separate two blocks of content in
menus, lists, toolbars and more. What I find is that we have ended up
with these lines as almost the only tools at hand for separating
content!

Of particular interest to me is that these separators, functionally,
have very little separation. They create a lot of visual noise, people
interpret the lines as separators if they see them, but at the end of
the day the two chunks of content are still squeezed closely together.
At a glance, the separation is not really clear.

Lots of new applications are moving away from the multitudes of lines,
though. The new Palimpsest Disk Utility is a good, full example. It
separates pieces of its UI through GtkAlignment widgets. This is done
because the semantically appropriate GtkHSeparator is a horrible, ugly
looking thing.

So, let's fix that!

As an experiment, I dug open Impression's gtkrc and tinkered with the
width and height of GtkMenuItemSeparator and GtkHSeparator. This is all
pretty straight-forward, though it also needs some theme engine work
which I haven't tried yet. Unfortunately, the TreeView widget seems to
do internal widgets like separators different than the menu widget does.
I couldn't figure out how to theme that, so Nautilus's ugly separator
(my inspiration!) remains unresolved.

As a result of that and laziness, my pictures are mostly a reasonably
attainable mockup, except the menus :)
They can be seen at:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/

I definitely don't think the mockups are perfect, or even particularly
excellent. It may be worth some pondering, though.


Bye,
Dylan