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Last modified 2 years ago

Theme Revamp

This page list discussions to revamp Enlightenment/Elementary?'s current default theme, also known as black-and-white. The goal is to make our systems visually appealing before we release 1.0.

Problems

Follows a subsection for each component that could be improved to look better. They were mentally sorted using the weight ((ugly * usage) / effort_to_fix), with explanation on current problem, link to alternatives and proposed fix.

Entry

By entry here we mean elm_entry with elm_scroller or elm_scrolled_entry. So the fix is not just to entry's style, but also a custom style to be used together by both.

Entry may make the claustrophobic die, text is quite small and there is no margin for text, so things feel way too packed. To make things worse, we use shadows.

TODO: screenshot comparing current b&w with windows xp, vista, macos, gnome and kde

Suggestions:

  • make it feel light and clean
  • rounded corners
  • light shadow following rounded corners
  • more space between text and box (scroller)

Button

Button feels nice, but when clicked the "pressed" effect is strange: a white glow that looks bad scaled (ie: large buttons) is used.

TODO: screenshot comparing current b&w with windows xp, vista, macos, gnome and kde

Suggestions:

  • Instead of glowing, more traditional displacement + lighting effects (read: less light, darker)

Spinner

Spinner theme is very bad, it is an ugly composition with side buttons. It is impossible to know one can drag the area between the buttons to change the spinner.

TODO: screenshot comparing current b&w with windows xp, vista, macos, gnome and kde

Suggestions:

  • ???

Scrollbar

Our scrollbar dates the period while people actually used scrollbars to drag and drop to move positions, so having it big and heavy made sense. However, Enlightenment can provide kinetic scrolling, and this is the default in Elementary, so having that big and heavy scrollbar that disappear is not so good.

Suggestions:

  • Thin and light scrollbar, at least if using scrollbars that disappear and one cannot interact with.

Toggle

Our toggle is very close to iPhone of Palm Pre in usage, but our choice of font weight and knob image is not the best.

TODO: screenshot comparing current b&w with iphone, palm-pre and others

Suggestions:

  • Better knob image
  • Bolder fonts?

Hoversel

Hoversel is currently a button with up-down arrow, much like a standard combobox. But when clicked, the lighting effect is very strange.

Suggestions:

  • ???

Progressbar

Although our technologies enable us to provide fancy scrollbars for poor souls that have to wait tasks to complete, we have something that is very far from impressive.

TODO: screenshot comparing current b&w with windows xp, vista, macos, gnome and kde

Suggestions:

  • Rounded corner container, with better depth feeling (shadows)
  • Better fill, more 3d look (maybe special ending/cap on the "growing" corner)
  • Random sparkling/blinking/pulsing effects, specially after scrollbar is idle for a while, to give feedback app is not stalled
  • Maybe colorful (red?) options

Inwin

Looks almost perfect, but more padding between contents and border would make it more clean.

Frame

Looks almost perfect, but more padding between contents and border would make it more clean.

Focus

Specifically for use in E, there needs to be some sort of indication where the keyboard has focus. This allows for keyboard-only usage.

Suggestions:

  • Some sort of subtle glow on the lower 20% of the widget
  • An animated pulse like the idle mouse action

Note on Current Behavior: E17 has proper support for focus, but raster left it out from current theme as it requires per-widget focus theming. Idea is to move to E18 and use Elementary, add Elementary support for "focus cursor" that would navigate spatially (bi-dimensionally) from one focus to another, guiding users and removing the need of custom focus per-widget (although that should be supported as well, since entry and others would benefit from it). Elementary focus support is bare so far (needs code to improve it -- not just a theme issue)

Better support for Small Icons

We can have shelves as small as we want, and below some threshold (IMO 24px) it is very difficult to have the scaled down icons to look good and make any sense. We have a great technology called Edje that allows you to know your gadget was resized and change the images and disable features based on new size (I did this for connman, it hides network name if less than 32px in width).

Suggestion:

  • Pixel-perfect monochrome (black/white) version of most gadgets images at 16x16 and 24x24. They must be simpler, battery would be like Canola/MacOS/PSP/... Same for wifi (connman/exalt), clock, cpu, temp and start. It would be good to have proper icons based on the shelf style (if it is light gray use black, if dark/black use white)
  • Small version of gadgets, simplified to show only important bits. Battery would just show icon (no text overlay), CPU/TEMP could be similar, or just show small icon alongside with value.