[openbox] aesthetics

[David Barr]

On 15 Jul 2005, at 17:03, Tero Grundström wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2005, David Barr wrote:
>
>> - softens the bevel on raised windows, this is basically so it looks
>> less harsh and fits in ore with my GNOME environment, mikael says he
>> cannot see the differennce, i think it would be of most interest to
>> GNOME users, because of the softness. the point of this is if you 
>> don't
>> use GNOME the difference in probably not even that noticable or
>> important to you, if you do i think it helps uniform your desktop. (it
>> ain't perfect but it's a start?)
>
> Nice work :) It looks a lot like the Clearlooks Metacity theme.
>
> Would it be technically difficult to add the possibility for rounded
> corners too?

rouded corners never have a happy ending, if you trace back rounded 
corner history most rounded corners end up being squared off again.

>  Imho it would then blend in even better with a gnome
> environment (especially with a clearlooks theme).
>

there is a square version of clearlooks (clearlooks-sharp) i hope this 
gets made the default as it is much cleaner and has no jaggedy bits :)

>
>> - uses larger font on default theme.
>
> One thing that has always really annoyed me in *box themes is the 
> usage of
> *very* small fonts (and buttons) in about 95% of themes. For me this is
> "only" a usability and aesthetic problem, but for visually impaired
> this would be a *real* problem.

it is not hard to change fonts per theme, someday i enjoy some small 
fonts, one of the good usability point i think of openbox is that the 
title bar and buttons do resize.

> Imho the font should be user configurable, so that it stays the same in
> all themes.
>
> Ofcourse, this would make the size of the buttons a bit problematic as
> they would be easily out of scale with small themes. Is this the 
> reason for the 'hard coded' font sizes? Would it be possible to 
> overcome this
> problem with oversized button images which are then scaled to the right
> size...?

you can pretty much sort out buttons and stuff with shadows or what 
have you it is not so hard, it is all about odds and evens, i am pretty 
sure pango is going to make this different anyway. it is mostly only a 
real issue for buttons with defined borders.

anyway when i have a working computer that is not running hot OSX (on 
which rounded corners sort of work, mostly because they do not have a 
border - the shadow makes the contrast and that it uses vectors not 
bitmaps...) so i hope to make the interlacing less harsh too, resolve 
my on going dispute with the grips, and figure out what to do with the 
under bevel, which remains unsightly....

also in response to Nagy, i didn't mean for any of this to in openbox 
as it is, i just wanted to put some ideas out there and hopefully show 
areas of the code where stuff lives so people who can code good may be 
motivated to do something proper. At first i thought the config option 
was a bad idea, but then i realised it would not be so hard to have a 
bevel.highlight: soft/medium/sharp in the themerc

i don't know

David



> --
> T.G.
>
>