New man at the Xiph RTP helm

I announced today that Luca Barbato would take over as project lead in charge of sherpherding the Theora and Vorbis RTP specifications to completion. Due to various reasons this work got stalled, but hopefully with fresh blood at the helm we can move things to conclusion. A lot of people are expression interest in ‘Ogg’ RTP and it would be nice to have something ready for them to start implementing and adding to their programs. With Thomas and Wim having worked much lately on RTP streaming support in GStreamer and Flumotion it would also be nice to be able to have it ready so we could start implementing support for it in the GPL version of Flumotion.

New librsvg release

Helped send out the release announcement today of
librsvg 2.11.0
. It will probably be our last libart only release as most work goes towards CVS head where the Cairo support is added.

Desktop Glitz

Seems quite a few people agreed with my previous blog about eyecandy. Been thinking about how we could proceed with the issue. One thing which could be interesting to do was to host a call on for instance art.gnome.org where we ask artists to come up with mockups for what kind of themes or effects they would like to have available. Then we review those mockups and proposals and try to come up with a todo list for the various projects like GTK+, gnome-panel and Metacity for what they need to add in order to enable such things. Like if we want animated or shaped borders in metacity what would need to happen and how should it happen. If we want to have the gnome-panel look like a Giger like cloud of swarming larvas to go with our Giger inspired desktop, what would need to happen. The goal would be that GNOME continues to look like today out of the box, but people can grab themes and extension packs that can give them very dazzling looks to the desktop.

4 thoughts on “New man at the Xiph RTP helm

  1. Seth Nickel posted some months ago some mockups of some very simple and clean GTK themes that could be done with Cairo. http://blogs.gnome.org/view/seth/2005/03/26/0

    Implementing those themes would be a huge first start, and I honestly think that it’s about as much eye-candy as you need in a normal application.

    Other areas wher eyou could add eye candy have very little to do with general theming and more to do with whole-sale modifications, such as totally revamping gnome-panel or nautilus to stop using the plain rectangular grey windows and start using the more fluid and free-flowing container shapes and designs that you’d see in a Flash or DHTML script (albeit with thought towards usability and accessibility and not just prettiness).

    It would also be nice to get a real usable official compositing manager in Metacity that has some nice effects. Make popups fade in over the course of .5 of a second (and be clickable from the moment they’re visible, so you don’t slow people down), or rotate the screen in 3D when you change desktops.

    Finally, it would be nice to see some real animation in any already-changing widgets. A slider that the user moves around should not be animated when idle, but a progress bar could have all sorts of nifty effects besides just changing length. (The indeterminate progress bars could be a lot more interesting than the bouncing bar all current themes use.)

  2. One comment I get again and again about GTK applications is that they look ugly on Windows. Actually, it’s usually a comment more along the lines of ‘but GAIM looks like Sh**’ in response to attempts to spread OSS, even to Windows users. I figure Linux looks a lot more familiar if they’ve been using Firefox + Gaim for a year already ;-)

    Anyway – while I know literally nothing about GTK internals, I do know that the current theme system sucks when it comes to Windows. As we bring the next generation of GTK theme-ability, it would be great if there were some way to make re-theming easier on other platforms as well.

  3. With GTK-Wimp (now included with GTK 2.8, iirc), doesn’t GTK just use the Windows theming system like all other Windows apps?

  4. GTK-Wimp has been included for a while, but even it doesn’t QUITE make apps look normal. Menus, in particular, look different.

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