Re: GNUstep Icons and look proposal

[M. Uli Kusterer]

In article <mailman.2188.1093098936.2011.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
 Nicolas Roard <nicolas@roard.com> wrote:

> Yes, that's what I was pointing.. I think we could set up the mechanism 
> for simply
> changing the default icons set by the user; and we could probably 
> package some
> of theses themes available on art.gnome.org and kde-looks.org ...

 Yeah. Just have a folder with icons that have special pre-defined 
names, and a user defaults entry that decides which folder to use when 
an icon is requested from IconKit. E.g.

  /Library/Icon Themes/NeXTstep/Folder.tiff

if the icon theme user default is set to "NeXTstep". Should be fairly 
straightforward to implement.

>  But , finding a good looking, original, default theme for GNUstep will 
> be hard.

 True. but it's worth the effort, and as long as GNUstep becomes 
themeable in the process, any minority that might object to the default 
theme can switch to a different one. 

> > - The widget icons kind of exceed the grey circles that are used as the
> > outline for the widgets. This looks as if it was a bug. Either make it
> > more obvious, or fix things so the circle lies outside the icon.
> 
> hmm.. you mean, for the icons in the open panel for example ?
> that's not as easily fixed though; I can't modify the button's frame
> (well I can but it leads to many other problems :), so the only thing I 
> can do
> is probably to draw the grey circles on top of the icons (or reducing 
> the clipping,
> which is kinda the same result)

 I'm talking about the close box of the window, in the title bar, and 
the "maximize" box.

> Well, it is gray :-) but ok, I'll test a darker gray.

 Yeah, the current shade of grey is about the shade MacOS X 10.3 uses... 
we'd need it darker to make it look different.

> Well, I'm not sure that this theme should be the default one. Depends 
> of what
> people thinks, but I think more people will still prefer the default 
> OpenStep one :)
> Anyway, it will be easy to change the look using themes, so..

 One thing: Rounded buttons look nice, but a lot of GNUstep apps 
apparently assume rectangular buttons (like GNUMail's Preferences 
window, whose scrollable list of buttons looks horrible with rounded 
buttons). So, I guess you'll want to switch to a rectangular shape.

 You could still have the rounded buttons in there, whenever a button 
has the NSRoundedBezelStyle. The default for a new NSButton in Cocoa 
still seems to be NSRegularSquareBezelStyle or something like it, but in 
dialog boxes NSRoundedBezelStyle is the preferred look.