Re: Themes (again)

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,


On 09/26/13 12:47, David Chisnall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently gave a little demo of an app that I'd written for exploring 
> debugging stream traces for our processor, and one of the comments was 'Oh, you 
> wrote it using TK?'.  I'd like to take some screenshots and also record a video 
> of the demo I gave at FOSDEM, but I don't want people to be put off by the 
> applications looking ugly.
>
> So, my question is: do we have a single theme that works, is complete, and 
> doesn't look like a throwback to the early '90s?
>
> In Étoilé we have:
>
> - Nesedah, where we spent a lot of effort getting the mockups right but then 
> hit problems with how GNUstep handles frames and borders and couldn't implement 
> it correctly
>
> - Narcissus, which looks okay except when you have a table view (because the 
> headers are white on light grey).  I'd fix this if the theme support were 
> documented sufficiently well for me to be able to work out how...
>
> - Aristo2, which got off to a promising start at the DevMeeting is unfinished.
>
> The Silver theme looks okay, so maybe it's a good choice, although still a bit 
> dated.
GAP offers a limited set of themes. Your asking for "complete" is hard, 
since while implementing I hit several limits in creating themes with 
thematic.. which result in parts not being implements as I wished.

The only close to complete themes I can offer are:
- Sleek. Either you like it or you hate it and I think for you it is the 
latter. I am still tweaking a couple of details before at least a "0.1 
release". A 0.2 release needs a new look in the menus, in the design I 
envisioned, but I need to learn to do that!
- Neos. The only theme hitting a 0.1 release in GAP. Some people like 
it, I don't love it anymore.. I did some mockups, but when I saw it 
finished and complete in acutal applications like GWorkspace, it is too 
strong. Also, you will find it dated, because it is very NeXTish 
actually. I'm studying an updated 0.2 release from what I have learned 
in Sleek, but it will take time to redo all the icon set in a different 
color palette.

I don't have  more radical themes in the pipeline, because I want to see 
these themes working first.
> On a related note, I accidentally set the colour of one of my views (the 
> background colour of an NSTableView, if this makes a difference) in Gorm.   How 
> do I set it back to the theme default, for whatever the loaded theme is?
As we discussed privately, I think Gorm would need a "set to default" 
option (=unset in certain cases) to allow reset choices, since setting a 
certain color is not the same as using a system default, now that we 
have themes. Here we differ from Apple!

I will soon ask again for certain stuff in themes to complete them.

Riccardo