Dust

This is a concept I've been working on.

Concept

Here are some guidelines I followed while making this:

• No custom software. It has to use an established GTK engine. This one is made with the Aurora GTK engine in mind, which sports a very polished look.

• Few custom icons. It was made with the Tango iconset in mind.

• It's visually neutral. The window decorations are not orange or brown — they’re predominantly dark gray. This is good so that when you’re viewing images or working on visual things, the colors of the decorations don’t influence your perception of the content. I think this is a strong point of OSX. Let the wallpaper define the look, not the window controls.

• It's dark, to be similar to the current Ibex theme.

• It uses the default two-panel configuration of GNOME. Not only is it proven functional, but people have been used to this and it would be awful to break their expectations. No AWN docks or anything fancy.

Concept Art

Contributions

Attach File

Comments

• I think Ubuntu needs a more colorful theme. This looks too much like OS X.
• The icons and buttons remind me of OS X. (Are you using an OS X based icon theme?) I'd change the toolbar buttons to look a bit less like brushed-metal and I think the normal buttons could use some prettying up. Asides from that, I love it. If you've already done any work on the theme, can you please upload it? -- Natan
• A W E S O M E. The only thing I would change are the buttons, they are too much Mac-ish and the GTK controls( just add some RGBA to make them prettier). Artir.

• I don't see how this is OS X-like at all. It's as if people think "looks too nice - like Mac OS X!". Care to explain yourselves, or are you happy just touting the position without constructive contribution? (Aimed at the two above Artir). As for the buttons... they are indeed round, but that's the only similarity I see. Maybe a side-by-side comparison would help. I think the smaller buttons are a good idea because they'll translate better to, for example, close buttons on tabs. It would be good to see how this will look with the minimize and maximize shortcuts in there, too. (Even if you don't intend them to be enabled, users may still choose to turn them on).
  
  The thing with MacOS's theme right now is that it tries to stay out of the way. That is, people aren't looking at it but at the contents provided by an application. Thus, any smart and unobtrusive theme is going to look similar. I don't think that is a problem. The only place where people can really legitimately say "looks like MacOS" (aside from window buttons) is if we break mouse acceleration, we reduce valuable functionality by adding a dock and all of our desktop applications start looking like iPhoto. As is, people may as well say "Ubuntu feels too much like MacOS" because the only time it fails is a kernel panic and it prefers very particular hardware.
  
  Back to the topic, I love the mockup! I am a big fan of having certain containers like menu bars and toolbars darkly coloured, but leaving any content with a light background. It keeps everything readable, organized and pretty darn nice looking, too.
  
  I like that your mockup does not rely on the widgets being positioned any certain way. For example, toolbars are not designed to flow into anything else, and the menus do not cast any extra colour to the theme. This makes it much easier to apply the theme without breaking anything.
  
  While it's quite a different topic, I like what you have done with Nautilus' toolbar. Replacing the context menu items (like Extract) with things that appear on the toolbar could be a nice direction for the future. After all, the context menu is only meant to be secondary!
  
  One other thing: You mention to "let the wallpaper define the look, not the window controls." I agree completely, but there is soemthing you miss. The CONTENT - that is, the stuff inside each window being decorated here - is also key. Let's allow good looking content to exist unhindered by arbitrary window themes. One way to do that is to remove overpowering window borders. For example, today's Human theme has overpowering window borders; a window open to display specific content looks caged off from everything else by a thick grey border. The border is nice for resizing, but that is about it. (And frankly, I think that needs to be fixed; themes should not affect interaction like that). You appear to be doing that, too, in your mockup... which means it gets an A+ from me! -- dylanmccall 2008-08-18 16:43:00

  • Hey guys, I'm the person responsible for the mockup here. Thanks for the comment guys.

    • Re: OSX look: I think most of what makes it OSX are (1) the icons, and (2) the 'unified' title/menu/toolbar look. As for the icons, I didn't really intend to use those icons. I lifted them from a screenshot of my desktop (which happened to be using a Leopard icon theme at that time). Ideally, there should be a theme to go with this. IMHO even the default Human icon theme will look good here.
      
      Re: posting the theme: Sorry guys, this is just a mockup. I'd love to develop it into a GTK theme but I'm not sure if I'll ever get to do that. Will update this thread in case that happens of course.
      
      Re: windowborders: My thoughts exactly too Dylan. Regarding resizing windows, I remember making an Emerald theme that has "transparent" borders -- i.e., meaning they appear borderless, but they can be grabbed by the mouse as resize handlers. Maybe this can be done with gtk-window-decorator too?
      
      Re: small min/max/close icons: Definitely a part of the mockup that didn't get much work on. Having just a close button (and invisible min/max) is unacceptable in my standards too. Sorry for being to lazy to mock those up too. -- rico-ambiescent 2008-08-18 22:13:31

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