Re: UI Review

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com>]

On 2/11/06, Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se> wrote:
> >To be honest I love the new theme and would be sad to see it go at this
> >point in the release cycle. Maybe Clearlooks-classic could be created in
> >gnome-themes?
> >
> "I like..." is perhaps not the best way to develop a interface like this.
> Most people that care about tiny details in their interfaces also know
> how to change them (like going to art.gnome.org or gnome-look and
> downloading a new one). Everyone else will probably be happy with
> whatever we give them (as long as they can get their work done),
> although we don't want to look ugly next to our competitors Windows and OSX.
> Looking good next to competitors was probably the developers intent on
> the changes made between the version in 2.12 and the current one. There
> is always the issue of color and glossyness attracting attention away
> from what you need to focus on (the human eye have a tendency to focus
> on colored objects), but I trust Daniel and Richard has taken that into
> account.
>
> Anyway, if the documentation screenshots and the interface don't match,
> it should probably be fixed in the theme for now, and then the glossier
> interface can go into 2.16 instead (if that direction is the right one
> for our users).

Well seriously, what about the Classic theme idea? I incidentally had
the same thought yesterday. If we'd have a stable and constant classic
theme, then we could always use this one for documentation while still
being free to update the look of the default theme at any time. The
changes between the default and classic wouldn't be large, mostly
details and some different colors, so users hopefully wouldn't be
confused by this.

My thought is that most users and distributions are using a customized
look anyway, so sometimes I'm wondering what the default theme is
really doing besides making us look slightly bad on reviews. Maybe I'm
getting this wrong and I'm obviously biased towards a current
Clearlooks, but I do think that it would make sense.

Daniel