Re: Re-inventing Metatheme

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 00:20, 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.

Which is a small part of why I think things like the desktop background
should not be in the theme, per se, but should instead be things the
theme can suggest. So rather than having a background setting, you would
have a button that says something like "Set background to theme
recommendation". This avoids a muddy situation where preferences exist
in multiple locations, and instead presents the theme suggested
background as a shortcut mechanism for setting the background.

-Seth