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

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi,

On 2016-01-22 13:25, Sven Claussner wrote:
> 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.

What is a "neutral" color? I do not know such a concept.

> - 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.

So should the whitest theme be even whitest? ("pure white" #FFFFFF 
even?)

> > 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 am the same (though I kind of got used to it after trying it out for a 
bit). But it seems some people like the themes very dark. Draekko was 
saying the Dark Side of GIMP was based on what he uses himself. And you 
said above "the darker the better", so maybe even Pippin would use the 
Dark Side too?

> 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).

If you are in LGM, we would welcome any kind of usability session where 
we would gather users to test GIMP on various topics.

> > 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.

As a side note, this is not a competition. We should support what we 
think is best, whatever other software are doing. So this is not that 
relevant information to me.

> 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.

Of course. As I said, now themes share most of their code. Only 
difference are the color schemes. That's still a lot of work, but a lot 
less than completely separated code. So I am fairly confident we can now 
have a few themes while keeping minimum maintainability.

I do hope that current contributors will stay for the long run! :-)

> My proposal is:
> - 1 dark theme for proper color perception and eye-saving work for 
> hours,

But which one? As you said first, it seems that the official stand is 
"the darker the better", but as you said second, and which I agree too 
is that the dark side is actually too dark for your taste. So which 
should we choose?

> - 1 white theme for proper color perception on prints,

Again which one?

> - 1 system theme for proper system integration,

What is a system theme? Do you mean the default theme?

> - optionally 1 theme for roundtrip work with other FOSS graphics tools
> (Blender, Darktable, Krita)

I don't understand what is a "theme for roundtrip work"? How could a 
*theme* be helpful to work with other software?

> - 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 will keep the current theme at the very least for development 
version, if not for the release, because it is basically a nearly "raw" 
theme. So developers will always need it to differentiate GTK+ bugs from 
theme bugs.

> 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.).

Having a good extension platform is one of my project for the close 
future, but that's a very different topic. :-)
It would be obviously very ideal to have a broad user-create theme 
choice, and easy way to get them.

> 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.

No. Duplicating themes for every purpose would be far from an ideal 
situation. We should be able to adapt any themes to any screen 
resolution (size of icons, text, etc.).
As said in a previous email, this is a work in progress, for instance 
for icons:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745835

Unless you find me any feature needed by HiDPI that can be done only by 
themes and not through code.

> > 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.

Cool.

> Greetings
>
> Sven
>
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