Proposal by Michiel3/Omeg

Please see the Usplash/EdgyPropositions page for a complete list of usplash suggestions. Post your feedback there rather than here.

I believe that the current usplash setup is fish nor fowl. It is possible that, for the common user, there is no need to display what is going on "behind the scenes" of the system that prominently during startup. I believe that the logging text should be removed in favor of a more graphically interesting usplash that is also more consistent with the default user interface inside of X. This change cannot be done before Dapper, as we're long past UI freeze, but might be nice to include in Edgy.

My proposal is as follows:

• Remove the text that shows what is going on "behind the scenes" of the operating system starting up or shutting down.
• Add a message that says either "System is starting up..." or "System is shutting down..." above the progress bar, exactly as written here, without quote characters.
• Reposition the elements on the screen in order to take full advantage of the room provided by the fact there is no longer any text.
• Update the visuals of the usplash to better integrate with the system's nice user interface. This includes:
  • A new progress bar that consists of 4 images:

    1. A dark underlying progress bar with reflection:

    2. A bright overlapping progress bar with more simple reflection:

    3. A small image (8px x 10px) to be placed at the right side of the bright progress bar to handle the transition from bright reflection to dark reflection: - It's placed at the right side of the bright progress bar, at the same height as the reflection, minus 6 px on the x axis. The last 3 px are only shown after the progress bar reaches 100%; they are hidden otherwise.

    4. Some examples:

       1. (At 0%):

       2. (At 50%):

       3. (At 100%):

All images are manually tuned to the pixel and use only 16 colors (15, actually, since one color was originally a shade of red used for the "fail" text). If anybody thinks that this would be nice, I'll put down how exactly it works in more detail and provide an example with ActionScript.

Note: I used a logo image which hasn't been compensated for the screen stretching of 640x400 yet.