Re: Look and Feel

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 18:57 Uhr +0000 13.02.2005, Nicolas Roard wrote:
> Yes, that's why we need a default theme, or at most, two (classic/modern)

 If you want my personal opinion: I like the old 
NeXT theme, so I would personally be in favor of 
keeping the general drift. However, I think it 
could use to be slightly freshened up. Some of 
the current approaches (making it a tad brighter, 
adding some gradients), plus smoothing one or two 
rough edges and making the spacing of one or two 
elements less crammed (yes, I'm looking at you 
tabs), are basically what I think is needed at 
most.

> As I advocated on the gnustep-ui list, I really 
> think GNUstep should focus on the toolkit part; 
> other projects -- desktop based on GNUstep, like 
> Garma, Backbone, étoilé.. -- could have the 
> liberty of choosing another theme than the 
> default NeXT theme, as it seems many core 
> GNUstep devs don't want to change the NeXT theme 
> to something like
> http://jesseross.com/clients/gnustep/ui/concepts/01/ui.png ...

 Personally, I wouldn't object to that theme, 
though it obviously looks rather MacOS X-ish. 
Maybe there'd be some way to make this look a 
little more like the old NeXT theme again.

> Bluntly, I think there is two kind of people 
> here -- the ones that want a NeXT desktop, and 
> the ones that wouldn't mind improving on it. Why 
> not then just leave that to different 
> projects... as one said earlier in the thread, 
> let's the public pick the winner. Anyway most of 
> the code (and probably will) could be reused 
> among projects.

 Personally, I think it isn't a good idea to 
cater to people who only want a NeXT clone 
without improvements. We've had people like that 
on the FreeCard project right from the start, and 
it never got anywhere. Of course it's hard to 
find a common viewpoint as to what constitutes an 
improvement and what is making things worse, but 
if someone just wants a 100% NeXT clone and stop 
there, I think they'd be better off just buying a 
used NeXTcube or slate and be happy.

> GNUstep's role should only be to provide an easy 
> way to change the theme -- and that's already 
> the case.

 I wasn't aware the new Chamaeleon had already been released?
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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