Comments on: art.gnome.org updates

By: anonymous coward

anonymous coward — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:27:07 +0000

I hope you are not computing popularity based on total number of downloads, because that would give older themes an advantage. This is especially bad because it gives the impression that all Gtk themes are antiquated!

Better metrics are:

- Average downloads per month

- Number of downloads in the last X months (where X is selectable between 1, 6 or 12 for example)

- Exponentially-weighted average of downloads per month. I.e. if A is a number between 0 and 1, and M(k) is the popularity value of the kth month then the metric is:

M(k) = A*[# downloads this month] + (1 – A) * M(k-1)

Then every month you just need to run the equation above. The problem here is finding the best value of A. Large A means the last months are given priority, which small A means longer time periods are taken into consideration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average#Exponential_moving_average

By: Flimm

Flimm — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:43:29 +0000

Fascinating! I never heard about the mime type for GNOME themes. Epidermis creates its own mime type (application/x-pigment) to do this. It probably goes a step further than x-gnome-theme-package as it also has a built-in thumbnailer, and a way to link pigments together using "skins". Funnily, enough, Kris Thomsen, it also uses Get Hot New Stuff for its online repository. I don't mind in the least bit if GNOME's going to duplicate the functionality of Epidermis, in fact, I'd prefer it that way!

By: Kris Thomsen

Kris Thomsen — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:15:00 +0000

Maybe go a step further, and make something like KDE’s Get Hot New Stuff-service

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:57:07 +0000

…Or even being able to point out similar themes could be useful, as there are so many very similar ones you might want the best version of a set of similar themes.

A lastfmy- other people who liked this theme, liked these themes maybe.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:54:43 +0000

Go on…. add something weird, like sort by colour (just the average).

More useful might be the ability to login and get it to remember your favourite themes.