Re: Clash of the Titans, GNUstep alongside GNOME

[Christopher Armstrong]

On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 01:29 -0600, Richard Fillion wrote:
> Talk about sticking out like a sore thumb.
> 
> It's not all bad though.  The GNUstep default look looks a little  
> more organized if you ask me.  But that may be because I love the  
> column view and despise icons like that.
> 
> A few things that should seriously be looked at:
>    - The attributes inspector for files.  The GNOME one is pretty  
> good looking.
>    - The AppIcon.  Not only is it not very nice (it's not ugly, just  
> not sexy), it's not being a very good X11 desktop citizen.
>    - Colors are much more soothing on the GNOME theme.
> 
> The GNOME menubar has got to be the most atrocious thing I have seen  
> in a while.  not to mention the taskbar/pager/quicklaunch?? bar at  
> the bottom.

Actually I don't mind these. GNOME is quite clean if you customise it
right (and I do), and the defaults are liveable.
> 
> We've all seen rIO's nice themes (right?? :P ).  They're nicer than  
> that default GNOME theme if you ask me.  Hint Hint.
> 
> More importantly though, would it really be that difficult to make  
> something that competes with GNOME as far as a "DE" goes?  GNOME and  
> KDE are not setting the bar very high here.  Would there also be a  
> way of making it cooperate a bit more?  I'm sorry but if the person  
> is running GNOME already, that AppIcon doesn't belong there.  The  
> fact of the matter is that if someone is running GNOME, they've  
> chosen their DE already.

I agree, we don't need to compete with GNOME. All we want is
applications that play nice with other desktop environments (one not
mentioned here is Windows, unfortunately one that prevents some people
from taking us seriously, which is a shame), and take on a default look
that is not out of place on a modern operating system. Nesedah, as
mentioned by Ross, is a nice theme I've had the privilege to play around
with. Obviously some minor bugs still exist in pixmap theming (that's
why I don't run GNUstep with Camaelon on), but serious inroads have been
made, and we're doing quite well at least. 

One thing I'd like to know, is if it's possible to Camaelon to merely
hook into the drawing code for widgets.  I would like to still use
NSBezierPath/NSAffineTransform/NSImage to draw widgets with code, but
in a themeable, unobtrusive way (i.e. not hacking gnustep-gui, but with
Camaelon). Last time I checked, this was at least possible
(GSDrawFunctions?).

Cheers
Chris

-- 
Christopher Armstrong <carmstrong AT_- fastmail dote com dot au>