Default Theme Progress

[Diana Fong <dfong redhat com>]

We collected a few more theme possibilities and had some brief
discussions on http://live.gnome.org/NewDefaultTheme . 

After looking them over, we felt Clearlooks
( http://live.gnome.org/ClearLooks ) was the strongest. After looking at
a lot of themes, they all started to look similar (gradient here,
rounded there, etc). Clearlooks is not particularly exceptional in this
regard, but it does look good. Overall its an excellent rework of
Bluecurve, already a strong theme. The main elements of Bluecurve that
made it, like, oh my gosh, sooo 1995 (the square-ish ness and the
computer-grey) are gone. We're fortunate that Clearlooks is under active
development, and judging by its past releases, it's still improving.

TODO:
1) Get Clearlooks into GNOME CVS
2) Get a GTK+ hacker to run through Federico's sanity checklist on
Clearlooks, and get any issues fixed

Looking out a bit farther, the whole theme set could use some cleanup.
There weren't a lot of options at the time we pulled them together, so
it's ripe for improvement. If somebody wants to start a wiki page on
this point, that would be good (Seth will get around to it sooner or
later, either way).

Currently, our approach to appearance/themes is hunt-and-gather. We
occasionally scavenge theme sites for available options and select one.
The theme often has rough edges owing to incomplete development, and
rarely evolves after we've selected it. The exception is vendor created
themes (most recently Industrial and Bluecurve), which are complete but
tend to have opaque design and development.

It looks like major rendering improvements are on the horizon with the
integration of Cairo into GTK+, GL acceleration, etc. These improvements
will allow the execution of designs that were heretofore not possible.
What we'd like to see happen here is for a uniform GNOME appearance to
be designed and developed inside the context of the project. If we start
working on this now we'll also be able to influence the direction of the
rendering improvements (nothing is generic...) to accommodate our needs.
Theming is all very nice, and we don't envision it going away, but
having one really strong look that represents GNOME is even more
important.

In short: we have the opportunity to create a definitive, unique, "GNOME
look" using a palette of new rendering tools

Anyway, that's the future. For now lets focus on the past, erm, present.

-Seth & Diana