Re: gep-2, Desktop Theme Sets

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

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 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.

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