Minor tweaks in Shearwater

[Pasi Lallinaho]

Here's a few things we should consider. Do not think these are something we *must* change. Only my personal opinions.

1. The hover-effect in panel (eg. hovered window title) color looks a bit odd. Can we make the panel slightly darker and after that see, if the hover-state needs tweaking?
2. Less rounded scrollbars. Rounding doesn't look totally awful, but I think I'd like a bit less rounded one. Also, the scrollbar could be one pixel wider (making it the same as it was in the old Albatross)
3. Menubar. It's now one pixel taller than in the old version, but the menu items are more condensed horizontally. Having used the old one for quite a long time now, I feel this is somewhat an accessibility issue. The less-condensed menu items are easier to read and hit.
4. The menubar and the titlebar do not match.
5. Overall contrast. I don't think we can actually tweak this a lot (at least not lower the contrast), but the new version definitely has more contrast and has a bit darker first impression.

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

A new version of Albatross, did I miss something?

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

Steve,

the new version has been in the HG repository for ages (13 days).

[Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi)]

after having tested the new albatross a bit i have to say i agree with pasi on all five points.

also: i really like the color-scheme of the old/current albatross theme. i know development very often means change, but on this point i'm not sure if it's a big gain.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

The color scheme change is not particularly good, but it's not particularly bad either. Once we get these things fixed and I get a recent enough Murrine engine in my Karmic installation, I'm gonna start using the theme day-to-day, which might bring up more things I'd like to change.

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

I just tested the new version, and I must say the changes are too radical
for me to keep up. James, I'd appreciate if you could split them into
logical parts and propose us a set of gtkrc's for each change you want to
introduce, so we can discuss them. At the moment so many changes just make
it hard to judge what's improvement and what's not.

Also, I have a partly broken theme, but this likely comes from a bad
installation of the trunk murrine engine so I won't whine about it :P I'm
just not capable of commenting the panel.

So far I will just say that I like the idea of the menu items and that this
may be pushed further, because the menu items I put in the previous version
were not really sexy...

As Pasi, I'm not a fan of the change of colour scheme. I think Albatross
looks colder this way, because of the darkness of the blues in use. I would
rather have something that looks "aerial", since I think it was an aim of
the theme in the beginning.

I think the black to white gradient on button and combo borders is also not
a good idea, because it gives the theme a more "plastic" look, while I'd
prefer something with low contrasts, a bit blurry, with bright colours.

Also, I liked the arrow used in spin buttons and combo boxes as it used to
be. The new one is more triangular, and has more straight edges, which in my
opinion doesn't fit well with Albatross.

There surely are many changes that can be done to Albatross, but I suggest
we agree on a few words that can qualify the artistic direction we want to
take for Albatros before bringing such drastic changes to it.

[James Schriver (dashua)]

On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 16:20 +0000, Steve Dodier wrote:
> I just tested the new version, and I must say the changes are too radical
> for me to keep up. James, I'd appreciate if you could split them into
> logical parts and propose us a set of gtkrc's for each change you want to
> introduce, so we can discuss them. At the moment so many changes just make
> it hard to judge what's improvement and what's not.
>
> Also, I have a partly broken theme, but this likely comes from a bad
> installation of the trunk murrine engine so I won't whine about it :P I'm
> just not capable of commenting the panel.
>
> So far I will just say that I like the idea of the menu items and that this
> may be pushed further, because the menu items I put in the previous version
> were not really sexy...
>
> As Pasi, I'm not a fan of the change of colour scheme. I think Albatross
> looks colder this way, because of the darkness of the blues in use. I would
> rather have something that looks "aerial", since I think it was an aim of
> the theme in the beginning.
>
> I think the black to white gradient on button and combo borders is also not
> a good idea, because it gives the theme a more "plastic" look, while I'd
> prefer something with low contrasts, a bit blurry, with bright colours.
>
> Also, I liked the arrow used in spin buttons and combo boxes as it used to
> be. The new one is more triangular, and has more straight edges, which in my
> opinion doesn't fit well with Albatross.
>
>
> There surely are many changes that can be done to Albatross, but I suggest
> we agree on a few words that can qualify the artistic direction we want to
> take for Albatros before bringing such drastic changes to it.
>

Sorry Pasi and SiDi, I think I may have over committed myself taking on
projects such as the UbuntuStudio artwork lead, which I abdicated,
preparing the community themes for Ubuntu, and an almost complete
rewrite of the Dust suite. This may have put Albatross on the back
burner for me and I am no longer running Xubuntu, back to GNOME. =/

I had difficulty with the mercurial repository so I attached the updated
gtkrc I have been working on. This version is more in line with the
original Albatross theme with an aesthetic update to the engine powering
the theme.

I tried to address all of the issues / critiques from the previous
posts. I'm quite happy with this version, but please advise on requests
and hack away as necessary to produce a truly aesthetically appealing
theme for the Xubuntu Desktop.

The expanders and spinbuttons are hard coded and can not be changed as
far as a line separating the spinbutton, style = 1 as opposed to 0. The
arrowstyles have been changed and we can change to style = 0, which I
think is quite ugly (screenshot attached).

Best regards,

dashua