Re: Re-inventing Metatheme

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I think its much cleaner conceptually and less confusing to avoid the
"bundle of themes" idea. This was one of the major usability problems
with metatheme. It is much better to present the desktop themes as the
theme (one which, granted, can be edited in terms of changing various
sub-components of the theme), and only have settings in the theme which
live only within desktop themes. The theme bundle is just an overly
complex idea.

-Seth

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 09:15, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> 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
>     
> 
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