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

[Nathan Beaumont]

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
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> ubuntu-art at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
>

I never really even noticed all those lines, but now that you mention it, it
does look kind of ugly. I say even get rid of the lines surrounding select
boxes from the drop-down menus, as seen in your
"nautilus-menu.png<http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/mockups/whitespace-not-lines/nautilus-menu.png>",
just without the 1 pixel outlines on the boxes. Also, could you email me the
widgets, I don't really know what your talking about with the GtkAlighn.
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