Re: [Usability] Colour Schemes Tab

[Mariano Suárez-Alvarez <msuarezalvarez arnet com ar>]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 13:02 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> Nickolay V. Shmyrev wrote:
> [..]
> > 
> > When work on gtk named colors was done first, it was supposed that there
> > will be color schemes that will define complete look of desktop
> > widgets. 
> > 
> > http://live.gnome.org/GTK%2B/SymbolicThemableColors
> > 
> > It's usually very hard to select consistent colors on the whole desktop
> > for all applications. That's why I wonder why this mockup proposes only
> > selection of several colors for text and background.
> 
> The reason there are only six colours is simply because you could
> possibly specify a limitless number of colours for different things on
> your desktop, but this would not be helpful, or very easy to use.
> 
> With the symbolic colours came the ability to shade and mix colours in
> the gtkrc, and I propose this as the way the theme will generate all the
> other necessary colours from the six provided.
> 
> > From ally view as well as to make color selection usable, there should
> > be just a list of predefined color schemes that every theme should
> > respect.
> > 
> 
> Predefined colour schemes are a good idea, but I don't think it's very
> useful to stop there. The point of this is to enable users to choose
> their own colours for their desktop. Having some predefined colour
> schemes are a bonus.

I currently have several Bluecuerve-* control themes installed (I guess
FC5 put them there) which are only different in their choice of palette.
I think that is a very ugly situation.

Ideally, I would love if themes were able to provide a list of palettes
variations, which would be offered in a combo box in that dialog. Having
themes specify their color variations themselves would eliminate the
need of agreeing in a standard set of symbolic colors.

Personally, I am not very interested, on the other hand, in being able
to pick my own set of colors (I tend to prefer the carefully crafted
palettes (good) theme designers seem to be able to produce with ease).
For those that think they can do better than theme designers, it may be
nice to figure out some way of letting them create color palettes for a
theme and install them somehow; a simple app to design palettes would be
easy to write (which would scan the theme for its symbolic color names,
and, say, present a color button for each of them or something in that
spirit)

I would expect most people would not go to the trouble of creating a
palette of their own, so this minor extra step for those that will be
doing so is not very problematic.

Btw, that theme dialog could very well be turned into a one-page
one-combobox-per-theme-parameter dialog quite nicely, I think.

-- m