MetacityDefaultTheme

Summary

The purpose of this spec is to define a default organisation and theme for window decoration.

The current default default metacity theme is really bad by some aspect :

It's difficult to see what buttons are and even that they are buttons.
Buttons are tiny, it's difficult to click on it.
Buttons are near each others. You often click on the other.
Two very different buttons are just next the other : maximise, wich only has a minor impact on your work and close, with can be dangerous for your work (or, at least, frightening).

The goal of this spec is to create a metacity theme where :

each button has his own color
Button are wide so clicking on it is easy
One side of the bar is for "window-only operation" (maximise, move, etc..) and the other is "operations that impact also the programm" (close)
The theme is cool enough to be a default theme

Elie is a old man. He is not used to mouse clicking and his hand tremble a lot. Moreover : when clicking on the mouse, he looks at the mouse itself to see if he's clicking on the right button. His cursor move a bit during a mouse click.
Simone is a newly comer to the computer world. She doesn't understand really what a program is. She is very good so she learned quickly how to create text with OpenOffice and sending them by email. But she doesn't understand the difference between the button called "minimize" and the one called "close". It looks like it's the same on his screen. Moreover, they are very close to each other !
Anders have very bad eyes. He has glasses so it can read on his screen but with big fonts. For him, there was no button in the window bar. When he heared about it, he saw a tiny white blur in the right top corner of his window.
Lionel is a computer geek. He want to be as fast as it can be on a computer. He just learned that color matching is ten times faster in his brain than pattern matching. He also heared about Fitz law.

There is one theme that match all criterions. It's called Pilgrim and it's quite enjoyable. Examples are given in the bugzilla entry :

This theme is just an idea and what can be done. Nothing more. http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=27516

What must we do with the "minimize" button. I saw that this function is really a big big problem for non-techies users. Even after years on a computer, my father is not able to understand the difference between minimize and close nor what a taskbar is (while he understands the multi-desktop concept). Maybe this must be discussed in another spec.
Colored buttons don't look good in all themes; white or gray buttons with colored symbols on them might look better? --JanClaeys

MetacityDefaultTheme (last edited 2008-08-06 16:15:14 by localhost)