Re: Look and Feel

[Nicolas Roard]

Le 14 févr. 05, à 04:58, Jesse Ross a écrit :

> I'm thinking of what a user first sees when they launch a GNUstep 
> based environment, be it Backbone or Etoile, or Garma  or the LiveCD 
> or what-have-you.

yes..

> I realize that this is more the responsibility of the desktop than 
> GNUstep,

that's exactly the point, yes.

>  but I believe I've read correctly that many users and developers on 
> the list would like to have some "theme" defined for GNUstep so that 
> users can easily recognize the environment, and we can more easily 
> market it.

yes, a "default" theme could be nice. but..

> Currently, this "theme" is the NeXT-inspired one, even if it's not a 
> theme proper. I would like to see that theme updated, and it doesn't 
> matter much to me where it is implemented.

.. I doubt we'll change the NeXT theme to another one. However, it's 
not exactly important, because you can easily use another theme.

> Using Camaelon seems like a fine way to do it, as long as all the 
> desktop environments agree to utilize that method. If using Camaelon 
> would slow the system or create extra overhead, than I would prefer it 
> was made the "native" look.

Camaelon will have extra overhead -- but it's just because it uses 
pixmap instead of drawing things "by hand" using NSBezierPath et al.

In other words, if you were to implements a new "native" look using 
pixmaps it will be as slow as camaelon.

A theme bundle by itself doesn't really add overhead, as it just 
poseAs: the class GSDrawFunctions (more exactly, Camaelon does that and 
poseAs also a lot of existing widgets that don't fully rely on 
GSDrawFunctions or use assumptions about the kind of drawings they 
need... I plan to move thoses parts directly in GNUstep, so Camaelon 
will effectively be in the end just a specific implementation of 
GSDrawFunctions using pixmap to draw the widgets...)

Objective-C power :-)


> I realize that that probably won't happen, as many users seem to be 
> satisfied with the current look, and changing the UI at that level 
> would probably require much more work.

As I said, the actual architecture is very close to that with the 
GSDrawFunctions class. Camaelon extends that class and modify widgets 
so they use it, and thoses modifications will hopefully rolled in 
GNUstep in the future. So you'll have a clean separation of the way 
widgets looks -- all the drawing will be in GSDrawFunctions.

--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
 -Arthur C. Clarke