Comments on: Red cheese

By: Joe Buck

Joe Buck — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:50:56 +0000

If the idea of red is to catch the user’s attention, that won’t work for a color-blind user.

But if themes had a designated style for emphasis (that is, how to modify a label to grab the user’s attention), a color-blind user, or a user on a B/W display, could choose an appropriate method.

By: calum

calum — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:43:15 +0000

@Patrys: you’re quite right of course, which is why I’ve often argued against making things too customisable– I’d probably remove a lot of the themeability from GNOME tomorrow if I could

But as long as we’re going the other way, making sure everything in our apps follows the user’s choice of colours, fonts and icons is probably the best we can do, because at least it always gives the user the means to put things right. If we try to guess the best colour for a given situation programatically, and it turns out to be wrong for some set of users, then those users are stuck with it until somebody implements a better guessing algorithm in the next version.

By: Stoffe

Stoffe — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:56:17 +0000

Bleh I hate that animation. I just want to snap a picture, not wait for it. It’s especially annoying when trying to arrange something. Ubuntu fixed that for a while, but now it seems the annoyance is back right before the release. So, a checkbox to make it go away would be the best theme ever for me.

By: Patrys

Patrys — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:15:58 +0000

calum:

The problem is 1) colors are customizable and 2) GTK themes are pretty independent from the icon themes.

By: calum

calum — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:13:06 +0000

@Raphael: I’m happy to be involved in that discussion (I remember when you brought it up originally). But I guess it mostly needs input from a variety of GNOME app developers (or at least a study of their applications) to see what they’ve wanted to use non-theme colours for in the past, and which ones they’ve decided were important enough to go ahead and hard-code in their apps. (I’m always wary of setting up online surveys, but that could be one way to approach it.)

@Patrys: I guess the “right” solution– or at least, the current best practice– would be to make the camera icon themeable, so that each theme can provide it in a more appropriate style and colour if the default doesn’t look good. Not ideal, I agree, but ultimately that’s what the themeing mechanism is there for.

By: Patrys

Patrys — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:08:49 +0000

We already discussed this and I think the consensus is replacing with active selection fg/bg to avoid ending up with stuff like white text on white background for some themes. The remaining problem is it uses an SVG icon for the last animation step and I have no idea how to make it use a particular color other than doing ugly in-memory parsing of xml before passing it to the UI.

By: Raphael Bosshard

Raphael Bosshard — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:50:55 +0000

Last year I sent a “Named Colours Proposal” to the gtk-devel-list[1]. It didn’t create much of a discussion, but the proposal is still on live. gnome.org[2].

Who to talk to about it? I’d track that issue.

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2007-July/msg00051.html
[2] http://live.gnome.org/Gtk%2B/NamedColours