Re: gep-2, Desktop Theme Sets

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Sending this again lest it be lost in the admin queue forever :)

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 22:12, Nils Pedersen wrote:

> But if we introduce say the concept of "User Theme" as well as
appearance theme
> (which we already have), then maybe both Bill
> and Seth will be happy.

I like this idea... I'm not sure it's particularly easy to draw the line
between 'appearance theme' and 'user theme' though.  For example, fonts
and colours are very much eye candy to some people, but necessary just
to make the thing usable for others. 'Appearance theme' and 'Behavior
Theme' might be a more manageable split, but unfortunately that puts
fonts squarely back in with appearance, which it sounds like the
majority of people don't want.

I haven't caught up with the backlog of mail (or the GEP) on this topic
yet, hopefully I will today.  But so far the Win9x Themes concept sounds
like the closest to something that might appease everyone-- you load a
theme, you get a checklist of all the elements it includes, and you can
opt in or out of as many of them as you wish, saving the result as a new
theme set if you want to.  

Individual distros and sysadmins could then decide which elements were
opted-out by default (e.g. fonts) whenever the user loaded a new theme
set (as opposed to one they'd saved themselves).  Or they could even
switch off the ability to opt into particular elements altogether I
guess, thus forcing the user into the relevant Desktop Preferences
dialog to change those elements.  Naturally I don't particularly relish
the idea of distro-variation on something that should be as easy to
agree on as this, though :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems