Category: GNOME

I just noticed that GTK+ 2.10 has a GtkLinkButton, so maybe I can get to close bug 323323. My ideas is to add a link on the gnome theme manager to link to www.gnome.org/themes (does not exist yet!), that will point to art.gnome.org/themes

I think this would give the perfect excuse to clean up art.gnome.org a bit, and get rid of some of the old/ugly/broken themes. My goal for art.gnome.org would be a moderated high quality art resource, safe for work and safe for family. Hopefully (if I can fix bug 325300) then it can just have “complete” themes, covering all aspects the theme manager does.

What do people think about art.gnome.org? Is it time to give it a clean up, and point it in a clearer direction? I think it needs a unique selling point, and that should be that it only has very high quality themes.

I used to think that the endless round of updates, and consequent moaning about them round the office, was a Windows only thing.

So, am I the only person who is getting irritated by the constant (nearly every day?) updates from Ubuntu? Would it be so difficult to roll these up and only release them once a week or something?

Now, thanks to
this thread, the Clearlooks theme <b>will</b> be the default GTK+ theme in GNOME 2.16, but it will <b>not</b> have the glossy scrollbars. So, Clarius is no more, and Clearlooks no longer has glossy scrollbars.

For those of you who like the blue glossy scrollbars however, do not despair! You can get your favourite scrollbar colour back by removing the comment mark on line 52 of $PREFIX/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc. And we will be adding a seperate Clearlooks-Bling (or some more appropriate name) theme to gtk-engines soon, so Richard can add any other “less-than-conservative” changes without upsetting any the default Gnome theme.

Just for clarification…

The new “default” theme in GNOME 2.15, called “Clarius”, is exactly the same as Clearlooks, except for the scrollbars.

The Clearlooks theme has glossy blue scrollbars, where as Clarius does not. This was the result of feedback from several members of the community about the new clearlook-cairo additions.

  

We want your screenshots for the GNOME 2.16 release notes!

Pile them up and we will put them on display. The better looking ones will get put in the release notes.

gtk-engines provides a central location for commonly used GTK+ engines.
It currently supplies several engines and default themes for those which
have one.

Many thanks to Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Berg and Benjamin Otte for their contributions to this release.

This will probably be the last release before 2.8.0, and we have now
achieved our goal of converting all the engines distributed in
gtk-engines to use the cairo graphics library, including:

Crux, Clearlooks, HighContrast, Industrial, Mist, ThinIce, Redmond and
Glide (a temporary cairo replacement for Smooth for the Glider theme)

Besides this goal, there have also been numerous improvements to the
engines in this release cycle, including:

• the creation of a shared library of common functions, macros and
  sanity checks

• vigorous testing to ensure the stability of all the engines
• and many, many visual improvements

However, there are still likely to be a few bugs left, so please do file
any issues and problems you have in bugzilla.

Sources

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk-engines/2.7/

5eece46b655fcf027d6b3775ef105bcc  gtk-engines-2.7.8.tar.bz2
4cf37b279a5a0530dbba8d0310c96dbd  gtk-engines-2.7.8.tar.gz

Overview of Changes in 2.7.8 (since 2.7.7)

Highlights in this release include:

• Add paranoia and deprecated configure flags
• Improve HighContrast (HC) engine inconsistent state check mark
• Use the base/text values for expander arrow in HC (fixes invisible
  indicator problem)

• Improve visibility/contrast of checks in HC
• Fix broken Clearlooks menu on panel check
• Implement a focus rectangle for GtkEntry
• Many other visual improvements to Industrial

See the ChangeLog for full details of other smaller fixes and enhancements.

Fixed bugs in this release:

• 349575 – C89 Fixes (Last C89 Patch to close bug)
• 350606 – Location of G_GNUC_INTERNAL breaks Solaris build
• 351057 – Leak in clearlooks_style.c

Yes, we’re already getting ready for the next Guadec. In case you’re not up to speed on the details so far, the venue has been booked for the 15th – 21st July 2007.

We know this may clash with another developer conference, but those details have not been confirmed yet. There are several reasons why we are holding it later than other years, one of which was that many students are unsure of their commitments until the end of July, and asked if it could be later.

Paul visited the venue (Conservatiore, Birmingham, UK) yesterday and took some pictures. Discussion is currently taking place on the gnome-uk list, but may move over to the guadec lists soon.

What does it mean to be a foundation member?

My personal response is that it’s a recognition of the time and effort I have put into GNOME related projects, whether it be helping out at LinuxWorld, administrating art.gnome.org, or writing patches for gnome-theme-manager and helping to maintain the gtk-engines, gnome-themes and gnome-backgrounds modules.

I have a feeling my original reason for wanting to become a foundation member wasn’t quite so honourable. I needed a gnome.org mailing address to use for the frequent communication I was doing on behalf of my administration work on art.gnome.org. Since then it has grown to mean more to me, in terms of acceptance and appreciation. I can’t believe it’s been just over two years since then, and I’m still here, even more active and involved than before.

It would be interesting to find out other people’s reasons for becoming foundation members, and even how they got involved in the first place. I spent some time asking people this at Guadec, and it was quite enlightening on the subject of how to encourage people to get involved. One of my conclusions based on the experiences I have had, is that no matter how hard you encourage someone, they will not become committed unless they have enough self motivation. Free and Open Source development is all about doing things to make your own life better. If it’s not for this reason that you get involved, then I doubt you will ever find satisfaction in what you work on in any Free Software project. Maybe we should focus less on trying to encourage developers, but more on trying not to discourage them. If they’re good open source type people, then they won’t need much encouragement, but they certainly don’t need discouragement.

So, I haven’t blogged since before GUADEC, and what a lot of things have happened!

Guadec itself was excellent. It was great to meet so many new people, but also catch up with old friends. The most frightening thing for me is having to do it all over again next year, but instead from the organisers perspective. It’s going to be in Birmingham, UK. If you’d like to get involved then you can either contact me, or get on the gnome-uk mailing list.

LugRadio Live was last weekend, and again it was a chance to meet new people and old friends. I hadn’t been before, but I was organising the GNOME stand. I’m never quite sure what the stands should aim to do, and what we as a project get out of it. We had a few laptops, but it was a pretty relaxed atmosphere and we didn’t have anyone tied to the stand. We have LinuxWorld in London coming up soon, and I’d like to know of any volunteers who might be available to help out. Again, the mailing list is probably the best port of call if you’re interested.

On the software front…

There have been several releases in our development series of gtk-engines. We have now made excellent progress towards our goal of converting all the theme engines to use cairo. This includes a new engine (Glide) to eventually replace Smooth, and also the new-look Crux engine (work in progress) courtesy of myself (coding) and Lapo Callemandri (mockup).

I’ve also been hacking on gnome-themes. We had a little informal meeting at Guadec about it, and decided to chuck most of the old and ugly themes away. If there is demand, then I will run off a tarball that contains the old themes so that you can still install them. The themes that are left are Clearlooks, Crux, Mist and Glider, as well as the accessibility themes. As I mentioned, Crux is getting a revamp, including new icons, and Mist is also going to get some updated icons (although they’re not available just yet).

Unfortunately, I haven’t had time in between all this to revamp the theme manager. There have been a few improvements of note, such as it’s now easier to install a theme, and you can save the current background when you save a custom theme. The main problem with the theme manager at the moment is that the UI just doesn’t scale very well. With any luck, I’m going to take a fresh look at it for 2.18.

I’ve been working on a patch for bug 167045, and all works well and good, except I cannot decide which buttons to put on my dialog. Here is the dialog so far:

The “Close” button seems a little odd, but an “OK” or “Cancel” button would be even worse. Does any one have any suggestions?