Re: GEP-2 Theme Sets (aka Metathemer)

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 21:53, Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> Fonts seem to come up a lot... (-:  I could change it to a toggle button
> instead of an 'apply button', but I'm not convinced that that makes any
> more sense.

Well, as Soeren said, it just makes it quicker to 'undo' an illegible
(or just plain unpleasant) font.  If you only have the 'Apply Font'
button, you have to go back and select a different theme (or perhaps
just add a 'Revert' button to the dialog) to restore some sanity.

I'm also wondering if it would make sense (or even if it's technically
possible) for a theme set change *not* to affect the Themes dialog
itself until you close it and re-open it again?  That would certainly
make it much less likely for a user to get into a state where they can't
see how to undo a bad theme.

> I don't understand why we want the theme to touch the font for a11y.  To
> be honest, it makes more sense to me that it wouldn't.  Once you have a
> good font that you can read you want everything to use it.  I don't see
> a point in over-optimizing for a pretty specialized initial use case.

Well, I know we're never going to agree on this :)  But I'm not
convinced it's an a11y-only case, although I agree it's primarily an
initial-use case.  

My guess is that most people who like to fiddle with these sorts of
things will want to change both their theme and their font pretty soon
after they log in for the first time.  So I don't see any reason not to
offer them the choice of a font there and then that harmonises nicely
with whatever theme they select.

Of course in the a11y case you'd be doing them a big extra favour,
because if somebody needs high contrast and large print and you have to
set theme and font in separate dialogs, then they have to either first
navigate a font dialog whose colours make it impossible to read, or a
theme dialog whose font is too small to read.

> Something like
> http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/thumbnail.png
> could be autogenerated for each theme and placed in the list.

It's a possibility, I just wonder if it would be big enough to offer
much useful information.  It is only a preview though I guess, so maybe
it would be sufficient.

> > http://www.gnome.org/~calum/metatheme.pngg
> Hrm.  That's not very GNOMEy.  I would almost want to put the
> gtk/wm/icon themes in a dialog rather than that.  The user interaction
> there is a lot more complicated, too.

Yes, as I said in the original mail, you'd probably have to at least
hide the whole right-hand side part by default with that design.  Which
as you say might mean it would be better in a sub-dialog or a separate
capplet altogether.  I doubt if we could really decide that without
saying how many people we expect just to use Theme Sets without tweaking
the sub-themes, and how many people we expect just to mostly ignore it
and set all the sub-themes by hand anyway... usability study, anyone? :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems