Re: [Usability]Re: A "cheat" to full window manager integration

[Josh Hoyt <joshhoyt yahoo com>]

Hello,

It is a point well-taken that designing entire widget themes is much
more difficult than just designing a window border, and so they should
be kept separate. I do believe, however, that it would be valuable to
have some sort of meta-theme that specified theme sets to apply across
Gnome applications. This way, the widget theme designer could specify
the window manager theme that he thought was most compatible with his
widget set theme, as well as other themes that applied.

Using this scheme, it would be possible to suggest default themes for
different window managers in the same meta-theme file. Just have a
section for each window manager that you want to suggest a theme for.

The burden of picking a visually compatible widget set theme and window
manager theme is taken off of the user, unless he chooses to go and
change each theme individually.

This idea can be extended to other preferences as well, for any Gnome
application, so that someone could package as a meta-theme any set of
Gnome preferences. Perhaps applying a meta-theme is just setting a
bunch of gconf keys.

Regards,
Josh Hoyt

> In short, making an exciting, attractive, yet usable
> window manager theme is fairly trivial. Making an
> exciting, attractive, yet usable widget theme requires
> a balance of functional design and aesthetics that is
> far more difficult to master. If the only way to theme
> the window frames is to theme the widgets as well,
> then you will likely get nice window frames paired
> with hard-to-read widget themes, because most theme
> designers are not skilled enough to handle both frames
> and widgets well.
> 
> Therefore, it is better not to pursue a combined theme
> format.


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