Can we have the mock-up svgs posted somewhere? I'd like to try out something if I find the time (both the main and marco's mocks)

Shared dropbox or some other evil service?

ivan wrote:Can we have the mock-up svgs posted somewhere? I'd like to try out something if I find the time (both the main and marco's mocks)

Shared dropbox or some other evil service?

regarding mine, the first is just a simple thinghie
http://notmart.org/misc/minimaltheme.svgz
(http://notmart.org/misc/rect5399_1.png for the background)

the second is just a screenshot of the current defaults with "contrast" moved from 0.3 to 0.1

The window design change wont happen in the first release (?). so it would be good to start a new little sketchathon for this a little later. because there are many ideas (and i have some too) but right now not the time and the hardware(thanks to my broken dvi cable) to do some mockups.


For now important world be whats with the tray icons 24 or 22px ?
i would love to see the 22x22 thing,

@notmart
Thanks!

One of the things I'd like to ask about is what do you guys think about having the default theme in dark variation as well. The Oxygen plasma theme does not really come close to Air.

This is a quick and dirty alteration of Marco's idea to demonstrate what I mean - the exact same theme, just dark:



If I had svgs for the windows, I'd try them both modified - so that we could get the feel of what the apps would look like in the real workspace.


@plusfabi

I like 22px as well, but lets wait for others to chime in.

Ivan: you read my damn mind! Awesome work! That - just that! A tad bit too sexy for words.

Plusfabi: Sebas suggestion was this

Somewhere in the thread icon sizes came along, basically the choice between 22px and 24x. Here's my take on that:

In the old world, the systemtray icons have been odd ducks, since they're fixed-size-mini-windows, nothing to do about that. In Plasma Next, we're ditching support for this old protocol, and use newer ones that correctly (almost) abstract data and presentation. Technically, this pretty much removes the need for keeping the 22x size, and that's a great thing: We already have tons of alignment problems in the panel, and losing 1px on each side of the systemtray icons compared to other icons in the panel is one source of alignment problems, and it can also lead to blurriness if incorrectly scaled. So from my part: we use the standard icons sizes *EVERYWHERE*, no 22px non-sense anymore.

Oh and we should do the window decorations for this release as they are the most visible ones - I gotta say I am a tad skeptical of the Gnome'ish one posted as an alternative earlier - I am not dismissing it out of hand ... I have a massive fever right now so I may not be mentally capable to make any form of informed decision but... a tad sceptical

Mostly because it is cutting it damn close to gnome and with the light theme we are already touching a bit on their design choices which should be avoided I think (not because they are bad - the opposite really - but because of "news" and "conservative users")

plusfabi wrote:The window design change wont happen in the first release (?). so it would be good to start a new little sketchathon for this a little later. because there are many ideas (and i have some too) but right now not the time and the hardware(thanks to my broken dvi cable) to do some mockups.

yeah, since a Qt widget style is very hard and long to write (oxygen is more than 6000 lines of c++) the first release will still have oxygen. work on a new one can start already however.

For now important world be whats with the tray icons 24 or 22px ?
i would love to see the 22x22 thing,

yeah, i would love 22x22, so they would have the same size as all the other toolbar icons

ivan wrote:@notmart
This is a quick and dirty alteration of Marco's idea to demonstrate what I mean - the exact same theme, just dark:

really sexy, and yeah, the oxygen plasma theme really needs to be mercifully put to sleep

btw, if all or most of the svgs of the theme uses the same trick of the systray icons to pickup the system color theme, it may be (almost) as easy as changing the colors config file

Ok so I have an insane fever right now but let me get this straight - we are creating an icon theme, systray icon theme and a plasma theme that not only needs to prepare for a better widget theme but also fit into the current one AND the current window decoration theme?

If that is the case - don't expect it to be very pretty or prepare for it to be the same thing as the old one with small tweaks and nothing else. Also this will be a very very rough sell and we should prepare for answering the question "So you're changes are: exactly the same thing as before but with more spacing?"

My suggestion is then to find a better suited widget theme and window decorator as an intermediary between the current and the new one just to create a little bit of distance.

Could someone walk us all through the exact details of changes without the maybe's, perhaps'es or I suppose's asap so we don't continue working on things that will become relevant six months from now?

(If its just my fever and headache that caused me to hallucinate all this, sorry. Also sorry for sounding gruff if thats what I do - pretend I'm smiling (in reality I am lying down coughing freezing my damn hands off trying to type this))

jensreuterberg wrote:My suggestion is then to find a better suited widget theme and window decorator as an intermediary between the current and the new one just to create a little bit of distance.

The applications widget style is a problem similar to the oxygen icon set. is so big that will take time to change.
also for the first few releases of the plasma next workspace, most of the applications would still be from kde4 (therefore forced to use oxygen), so would be good to have them feel integrated.

Starting with having just the window decoration and eventually replacing the application style may indeed be a good idea (also kde4/gtk apps would get the new decoration).

The plasma theme as opposed to the widgets theme is much easier to do, and is much more realistic to get a quite different one in for the release (iterations of the ones in the kde4 history were usually done over a couple of weeks prior artwork freeze between me and nuno).

I know releasing pieces of the new style one bit at the time isn't much optimal, but is pretty much what is feasible.

I know it sounds crazy, but applications and plasma draw things in a completely different way, so their themes even if they are both the same set of buttons, sliders etc, they are completely different beasts.
Maybe in the end the new styles will looks much more similar than now between applications and plasma, but would still be two different themes done in a completely different way that just happen to look similar or the same.

(If its just my fever and headache that caused me to hallucinate all this, sorry. Also sorry for sounding gruff if thats what I do - pretend I'm smiling (in reality I am lying down coughing freezing my damn hands off trying to type this))

ouch, best wishes to get well :/

Fair enough - lets see how we can make oxygen as good as possible for our benefits. What can we change in oxygen without ruining it?

Like how flat can we do it? Can we edit the window decoration buttons? Stuff like that...

Still groggy so I'm going back to sleep. Thanks Marco, will take more fever supressants and headache pills... I had the weirdest half-waking nightmare, a man walked by my bedroom door looking in at me and the corridor outside was not our corridor. Then he closed the door and told me to open it I think...

We can edit the window decoration to be almost anything you come up with. The problem is only the widget style.

Theoretically, we could create a theme for QtCurve, but I always found that engine lacking even with its thousands of options.


> Still groggy so I'm going back to sleep. Thanks Marco, will take more fever
Unfortunately, I can relate. Even missed Deep Purple concert for which I bought tickets 5 months ago. :/

...And here's when I put my spoon in this thread and throw this:

viewtopic.php?f=285&t=119702

QSS anyone?

ivan wrote:> Still groggy so I'm going back to sleep. Thanks Marco, will take more fever
Unfortunately, I can relate. Even missed Deep Purple concert for which I bought tickets 5 months ago. :/

ouch, hugs! i would have hated that
(just came out of the same freakin flu a week ago)

> QSS anyone?

QSS is limited, but it might serve us for the time being.

ivan wrote:Can we have the mock-up svgs posted somewhere? I'd like to try out something if I find the time (both the main and marco's mocks)

Shared dropbox or some other evil service?

Sure Ivan! The source for these most recent mockups is here: http://goo.gl/8ff1qp
(Make sure you have Oxygen Light, Oxygen Bold and Oxygen Normal typefaces installed on your system.)
The mockups are 1:1 svg renders (1080p HD resolution for full desktop mockups).

I totally appreciate your observations while we sort through nailing down a visual design. It'll take some patience with some experimentation and some willingness to explore till we nail something down. (I've had to constantly fight my own bias toward the familiar to force myself to look at/create something with a fresh eye.) I'll definitely take a look at the tabbed window design - thanks for the reminder. For the window dec design in the mockups, for maximized windows I'd just have the blue bar sitting at top, spanning the width of the screen.

One thing I'm trying to accomplish by pumping out some of these mockups is to bias us toward judging each element as part of a whole, rather than each in isolation: a whole application, a whole set of applications, a whole applet, a whole desktop environment with applications. Something that might look great in isolation may not work as well when used across different applications and across both the desktop workspace and applications. Similarly, something that might not look great in isolation may work quite well when considered as part of a whole.

Ok that's enough words from me today. Back to talking with pixels! More mockups coming soon!