Re: [Gimp-gui] GIMP Theme UI now and future.

[Sven Claussner <scl gplus gmail com>]

Hi,

On  21.1.2016 at 10:44 PM Jehan wrote:
> The new themes are now sharing most of their code, but the color
> schemes, which makes them very maintainable and it makes me confident to
> have many variants of the colors if neded. I would not even mind having
> all 5 of them, especially since it looks like every variant may have
> someone's preference? All tastes are in nature, that's the saying, right?
>
> For reminder, here are side by side screenshots of all 5 variants
> currently being WIP by Ben (alias Draekko):
> https://github.com/Draekko-RAND/gimp-themes

Draekko and Klaus did a great work.
In IRC we had a discussion a few days ago. IIRC the results were
- the theme should have a neutral color to not distort the image's
color perception.
- Pippin recommended 'the darker the better', because it supports the
image's proper color perception best.
- A pure white theme would reflect the proper appearance of the image
printed on white paper.

> I'm thinking, maybe the lightest theme should be even lighter?
> Personally I feel like I would likely use "Sea of Grey" or the "Dark"
> theme.
I personally find the Dark-Side-of-GIMP theme a bit too dark and would
prefer just 'Dark', but that might be a single person's matter of taste.
I think we should involve the users to decide over it and run a user
test/evaluation like Peter Sikking did some years ago for the tools
(it's in the GUI wiki). Then we knew for sure and could meet the goals
I've outlined in the spec (http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Specs:UI_Theme).

> Should we push all 5 of them? Should we discard some?
BTW: Krita has 8 themes with more or less small differences, PS CS 6 has 
4 themes.

We should make a compromise between trying to serve everybody's needs
(which will fail by nature) and maintainability. At the end somebody
will need to care for the themes in the codebase and this could easily
be us.
My proposal is:
- 1 dark theme for proper color perception and eye-saving work for hours,
- 1 white theme for proper color perception on prints,
- 1 system theme for proper system integration,
- optionally 1 theme for roundtrip work with other FOSS graphics tools
(Blender, Darktable, Krita)
- optionally the current 2.8 theme. Some people might like it
because they are used to it. We don't need yet another save-export-like
discussion.

We could provide a link collection to other good themes together with
a tutorial on how to install them or later extend the plug-in registry
to hold themes and art resources (brushes, patterns etc.).

For OS X 10.10+ system integration I plan to update my theme and
perhaps use the symbolic set already for 2.8. if it matches better
the OS X look and feel.

Another point is the size of the theme. Nowadays we have HiDPI monitors
and even the default size theme is hard to read. We should drop any
small themes and replace them by big themes for HiDPI monitors. The
icons could be vector icons or be rendered during the build process.

> Also there are still a lot of bugs here and there. It would be awesome
> if people could test them and report bugs.
Indeed, see my notes on user testing above.

I hope to find time to move my spec to the GUI wiki in the next days.

Greetings

Sven