Hello. I'd like to give my point of view of the current state of Bluecurve and desktop integration in Fedora, focusing on the artwork. -- The icon set -- The BC icon set is of course comprehensive and generally of very high quality, but there are areas where it is lacking: very small icons, 16x16 or 20x20, are often badly hinted. It looks like the 48x48 version has been scaled down, and a very sharp black edge has been added along the perimeter. Sometimes hinting is missing entirely, leaving a very blurry icon. Also, too much detail is crammed into the small icons. Compare these two screenshots of the Gnome file selector: http://petrix.se/fedora/fileselector_bluecurve.png http://petrix.se/fedora/fileselector_gnome.png The Gnome icons on the left are not only scaled-down versions of the larger ones, but completely redesigned. The Bluecurve Home and Desktop icons are good examples of down-scaled, black-outlined icons with too much detail, and the filesystem icons are missing hinting. I think focus should shift from providing half-done icons for every single menu entry (Sound Juicer, XChat, etc) to improving the icons that make sense for cross-DE (desktop environment) integration, such as basic operations (open, close, home), navigation, RH/Fedora specific applications (system-config-*) and maybe a few main applications (web browser, email program). Build on top of the existing Gnome and KDE/Crystal icon sets, adding a unique "feel", instead of replacing 100%. Ximian Desktop only changed the folder icons and a handful of others, but along with the Gtk theme it made a huge difference. The KDE Crystal icons go very well with the BC icons, and KDE would benefit enormously from better 16x16 icons. -- KDE/Qt -- KDE and Qt are obviously not the main focus of the Fedora desktop team, but the Bluecurve Qt theme was a pioneering effort. However, the version shipped with FC3 has a long list of rendering differences from the Gtk theme. I have personally done some hacking on the Qt theme, trying to bring it closer to the Gtk one: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=141125 None of it has yet shown up in Rawhide, despite being well received. A lot of 3:rd party commercial/scientific applications are written in Qt, and having a near-perfect Qt theme will add to the professional feel of a Red Hat/Fedora desktop. Maybe Qt could be modified to use the Gtk file selector, when an environment variable is set? -- OpenOffice.org/NWF -- The state of of NWF in OOo in 1.1.x, and also in 2.0, is promising at best. If it were up to me, I wouldn't ship it for a few more months. The widget coverage has increased in 2.0, but the quality of individual widgets is still very low. http://petrix.se/fedora/OOo.png Sizes, alignment, shapes, highlighting etc etc. Since the Open Office suite is such a prominent application, I believe more manpower should be thrown at the problem. I know this comes off very negative, and I do not mean to diminish the efforts of the NWF hackers (Dan W for example). It will look tremendous once it's done. It's just that 100% of the widgets are 50% finished, and it would look a lot better if 50% of the widgets were 100% done, and the rest were #ifdef-ed out until they are done. A guide to hacking NWF would be great to attract outsiders, and a list of tricks to build the beast for limited (NWF-only) testing. Stuff that can be ./configure-ed out, ccache etc. -- Firefox/Thunderbird (XUL) -- FF/TB look fairly good already, but have a number of annoying rendering bugs. Submenu arrows, icons alignment on buttons and so on. Better icon coverage in the menus would also be nice -look at the Industrial theme, it has icons for nearly every menu entry: http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2004/09/20/industrial-for-firefox/ -- Conclusion -- So let me sum up: * Fewer, but better Bluecurve icons. Focus on the small ones. * Fix the Qt theme. Patch and bug list in Bugzilla. Not complete, but a good start. * More manpower to OOo/NWF, it's farther behind but very important. * Better icon coverage in menus/preference dialog in FF/TB. /Peter Backlund -- Fedora-desktop-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-desktop-list
