Gnome Beautification "Movement"

[Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>]

There is a general "movement" towards beautifying gnome, and making it
look better by default. We have to stop relying on Redhat/Mandrake to
fix this for us downstream. Gnome has the greatest potential of any
desktop I've  encountered for "prettyness", but we don't protray this as
well as we should with the default setup.

I've posted recently to desktop-devel-list about replacing the default
background and tidying up gnome-desktop's icons, and I've been in
contact with Luca Ferretti and Jimmac off the lists. But I'd like to get
more people involved and bring it all "out into the open".

So I would like to invite you to join me here:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-themes-list

Current plans and ideas include:

Icons:
* Merging artwork from xd2 and Jimmac's collection into gnome-icon-theme
* Generally improving the icon theme by adding/replacing more icons
* Cleaning up gnome-desktop/pixmaps, replacing instead of removing icons
  if possible to satisfy backwards compatability.

Default Background:
* Changing the default background color for gnome
* Adding a translucent desktop background by default

And further in the future
* Creating a gnome-backgrounds package or sub-package
* Designing a better background browser/chooser for the desktop.
* Designing a better icon chooser for the launcher editing dialog
  that would allow access to all icons in the current icon theme.

Luca has more detailed ideas/plans related to most of this, If you join
the list, and poke at him a bit I'm sure he'll explain them to you.

I won't be around for the whole of July, but I have no artistic 
talent anyway. So I'm going to try and get the ball rolling
and get all the talented artists working together before I go :)

Thanks for listening

-- 
Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>