10th October 2008
start Meeting notes for our meeting in #gnome-art on 10th of October 2008. Raw meeting logs.
Agenda
- News/Latest developments
Discuss the Roadmap draft by hylke
Minutes
Present People:
- Thomas Wood
- Andreas Nilson
- Hylke Bons
- Benjamin Berg
Evangeline McGlynn
- vdepizzol
- Máirín Duffy
- Rodney Dawes
- Andrea Cimitan (arrived late)
The discussions in the meeting was quite long and not that organized. Here I try to summarize much of it.
Roadmap
There has been a lot of discussions about the draft that Hylke Bons created [0]. It was noted that the ideas from Hylke also came up on the user experience hackfest [1].
Hackfest
Andreas Nilson summerized the hackfest a bit. He has worked mostly on animations during the hackfest.
Benjamin notes that on the GTK+ level there is no support for these things. The general consensus is that these kinds of animations are great to have. But one needs to be careful to not overdo it. Andreas and Evangeline are planning to do more experiments in the future.
http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest/EffectsAndAnimations
Wallpaper Contest
Thomas suggests not to have a wallpaper contest. Other possibilities to get good wallpapers would be to search for them online, and get permission, or create custom wallpapers.
Distributions
There was quite some discussion about modifications done by distributions. Most distributions create their own theme, and keep shipping the GNOME themes to have more choices. As we need to keep our limited resources in mind, we should focus on shipping only a small amount of good themes.
Máirín gave some insights into distribution work. Fedora Core does not have any marketing involved in the customization. The changes done are community driven. According to Máirín Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses Clearlooks for the GTK+ theme.
Unfortunately there are not many distribution people involved with GNOME Art. Ideally the distributions would work together with upstream (and we with downstream).
Smaller Font
Currently GNOME uses a standard alias as the default font. Using a specific font would mean adding a dependency for this font. There was no final conclusion whether a smaller (thinner) font is really what we want.
Custom Font for symbols
Andreas suggested to create a simple font with symbols that can be used instead of icons (close tab, close window). Using a font would mean that the theme colours can be picked up automatically. Andreas wants to look into creating this custom font. Benjamin notes that some changes will be needed in places (menu items)
Tango as the default icon theme
Tango (or the next generation version) as the default icon theme for GNOME. This would save quite some work, because gnome-icon-theme could be dropped. The reason that this was not done before was not only the license, but mostly of political nature. As Rodney explained it is so that people do not see it as GNOME forcing the icons on KDE. Benjamin asks whether Tango could be an external dependency of GNOME.
Splash Screen
If one needs to have a splash screen it could be a nice and simple spinner instead of showing flashing icons.
Misc
This is some things that came up at the end of the meeting.
RGBA visual
The problem here is that many applications expect to have an RGB visual. What would be needed here is support inside GTK+ to change the default visual dynamically depending on eg. an environment variable.
Color Scheme support
There are different ideas to store colour schemes. Either a new file is added, or the information is added to index.theme (metatheme) file. No final conclusion was reached.
Panel Theming
The gnome-panel cannot be properly themed currently. There are different ideas to change this, one of them is to use the existing transparency feature and let the theme draw on top of this. This would make it possible for a theme to draw "transparent" on top of the desktop. To give theme the necessary information about the position of the panel one can use special detail strings.
[0] http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/wip/gnome-art-roadmap-draft.pdf [1] http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest/