Re: New member

[Martin Lettner <m lettner gmail com>]

Hi Andreas!

Instead of creating a new engine we should focus on the 2 major engines, clearlooks and murrine and maybe drop all the other old bad-looking engines. And someone finally should support the active developer who made clearlooks and murrine that powerful and beautiful: Cimi. These 2 engines offer enough to create wonderful clean themes. The RGBA thing, which IS working, should be default for 3.0. Then we would have nice unobtrusive transparency effects on all gtk windows.
Please someone look into getting those gtk-engines into the next level. They already have so many features and only some themes are using them. The RGBA-update would totally fit the 3.0 plans I think.
If there would be a really simple theme modifying tool, users could easily make some changes to the theme. I think about having a light and a dark default theme, just 2 perfect, totally bug free themes. They are let's say blue by default, but since there is a totally simple way of changing the main color of the theme the user just picks let's say a nice green (preconfigured values for blue, red, green, pink, violet, yellow,... maybe the tango colors; BTW: whats up with the color-scheme-chooser?). As easy of changing the main color, there could be a few options for paddings and icon sizes, just thin/normal/wide, small/normal or something. So you could build your theme with a few clicks, and because of a clean coded theme and just some global settings the individual theme would look perfect in every application. Also the used engine could be changed from here since the same settings should work on clearlooks, inverted and murrine.
If somebody likes that idea I can make mockups for that. All of that is really easy to implement since everything is already there...

Hmm I would also like to help out with any work on gnome (ideas, website,....) since I have quiet some experience, study mediatechnology and mediadesign and I really love gnome!

Best
Martin

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 8:36 PM, Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se> wrote:

Hi Anton!
I like your work on New Wave. Welcome to the team!

We haven't made a concrete roadmap for 3.0 yet, but here are some ideas:

* New widget theme and cleaner appearance.
I think we need a new widget theme, and this is also something mentioned in the wider 3.0 plan [1]. It would be nice with something light and clean. The current look is a bit heavy with lots of bevels going on and lots of lines everywhere (not only related to the theme though). The other desktops (vista, osx, kde4) seems to go for a quite heavy and glassy look and it would be cool with something different from this (and what about making stuff green instead of the dominating blue?). This would also require to clean up our current cluttered appearance, #557469 [2] is a step on the way (once it get in), but I think we could do the same for button icons.
A new theme might require a new engine, but a sane approach is probably design first and code later.

* New look & feel for the website.
The website looks quite nice compared to how it used to be, but I think think we should update and clean up a lot of the content to be more direct in our approach. This goes for the design as well and we need a couple of designers to create a design and suitable illustrations. I have a couple of ideas for this already, but we need to check what the people on marketing list have in mind first. Anyway, I would like to assign myself to work on this, anyone else?

* Icons.
Lapo and Jimmac have been working hard on new icons mixing the best parts of tango-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme with lots of nice 256x256 icons. We need more of those.

* Other stuff
Stuff that probably needs some work: HighContrast icons, better sounds, visual design for dialogs, updated games graphics, visual help with the journal and shell, nice looking printed materials about 3.0 for conferences and fairs.

Any other thoughts people have on their minds and are interested in working on for the year up until 3.0?


1. http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan
2. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469