[indiana-discuss] OpenSolaris GUI

[Calum Benson]

On 24 Oct 2007, at 19:14, Mario Goebbels wrote:

> Here's how I see it:
>
> Gnome or KDE in themselves aren't the issue. The themes are. Window  
> borders, control themes, icons, fonts (including hinting and  
> antialiasing), size of paddings/spacings and margins, colors,  
> dimensions of controls, and so on. In my opinion, especially wrong  
> fonts and spacing are a deal breakers.
>
> Looking at how e.g. Gnome’s default style looks, as it does right  
> now, compared to what Windows or MacOSX look like, it makes me wrap  
> my arms around my head. And it can be fixed, given the right themes  
> or theme engine, window border and font. Because those are the  
> things I changed to make it look way better than original (granted,  
> at least my window frames are inspired by Vista (a lot)).
>
> What at least one company active in the *nix field needs to do is  
> to hire a team of competent designers.

If you have specific issues with Sun's default (Nimbus) theme, please  
file them as bugs, and/or raise them over on the desktop-discuss list  
where at least one of our "team of competent designers" hangs out :)

Personally, I've always believed that making any UI highly themeable  
inherently limits how good you can ultimately get it to look anyway,  
as you have to keep all the visual elements completely self-contained  
in case somebody decides to change the look of one of them.  This  
limits the ability of a designer to finesse the appearance of certain  
combinations of elements-- at least until we have the ability to  
specify the UI equivalent of something like kerning pairs :)  So the  
likes of Mac OS X, which is almost completely unthemeable without  
some nasty haxies, are always going to have the edge IMHO.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems


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