Re: Re-inventing Metatheme

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

Metathemes should be presented as a "bundle" of themes for various
applications. The idea I had was that these metathemes could be
distributed as either a bundle of themes, or individual themes with
the same theme name. So that the options presented to you were based
on what you had installed, and not what you could theoretically do
with the settings. Individual theme settings should also still be
available in some manner, so that individual parts can be customized,
and it would be easy to create metathemes.

-- dobey

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 01:20, Havoc Pennington wrote:
    Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes: 
    > This sounds inadequate from a usability perspective. The typical theme
    > user will only care about setting a matched set of themes, not
    > monkeying with them individually. Therefore it is important to be able
    > to answer questions like "what is my current theme" in the simple UI
    > that only gives a list of metathemes, so you have sane feedback when
    > you change it, and can go back and look later to tell your friend the
    > name so he can try it too, and so on.
    
    If I choose the Jungle metatheme and then customize the background, is
    the Jungle theme still selected?
    
    That question is just as hard to answer however you implement
    things. If you can come up with an answer, then I bet it's just as
    possible to implement the answer given my cheesy implementation as it
    is with some more overengineered implementation. e.g. maybe the answer
    is "the last metatheme you manually selected" or "the metatheme most
    like your current settings" - both implementable with my cheesy
    approach.
    
    Whether you present metathemes as a kind of theme (with a list of
    themes and an active theme) or as a bundle of prefs to apply
    write-only, is a UI issue that's orthogonal to how you implement.
    
    Havoc