Archive for November 29th, 2005

Posted on November 29, 2005 - by jono

Creating standard themes

Today I have been doing a little research into how likely a cross-toolkit theme is. After some comments I made in a previous blog entry, I had some comments from Ross Burton and the discussion led onto that of how Cairo stacks up against Arthur; the new Qt painting system. To get a better idea of where Trolltech are heading, I mailed Matthias Ettrich to see what his thoughts were. Matthias is naturally really eager about Arthur, and he felt that Arthur provides a better solution to the problem than Cairo currently offers. The discussion continued about how a cross-toolkit theming API could be developed, but Matthias believes that we should instead pick a few standard themes and create versions of those themes for each toolkit. He is of course, entirely correct.

I am convinced we really need a limited bunch of standard themes that can be implemented in a variety of toolkits. So, for example, lets say we have a theme called Sizzle. It would be great to have a detailed specification of how the theme should work, and then the relevant Qt, GTK and other developers can take that specification and implement it in their toolkit of choice. Naturally, the specification and choices made to create that specification need to be created by people who are keen to build this inter-operability with KDE and GNOME and other desktops/window managers. Some themes will naturally look a little more like KDE and some more like GNOME.

The perfect place for this to happen seems to be The Tango Project. The folks behind this project are creating icon specs and style guides to satisfy some of these goals, but a consistent theme has not been the focus of the project as yet. So, I headed over to #tango on IRC and had a chat with tigert and straw and they are keen about the idea. The challenge of course is not only in building a theme specification that everyone is happy with, but also attracting developers to create the theme implementations. Unfortunately it seems that not a huge amount of Qt and KDE people are hooking in with Tango, despite the project’s extensive campaign to assure everyone that it is not a GNOME specific effort.

I think this is an exciting time for the look and feel of desktop Linux, and Tango is really important to help unify these disparate entities. Lets see where the discussion takes us…

Posted on November 29, 2005 - by jono

Crazy rights

This morning I popped over to see the LUGRadio Listener Map and it looks ever more astonishing:

Last night I wrote an article called UK Digital Rights: Make Your Pledge to encourage people to go and sign up to fund the Open Rights Group. I am pleased to see they have achieved their 1000 pledges, and they continue to roll in. Thanks to everyone who has signed up, and those of you who haven’t, there is still time to pledge.

Thanks for the comments about Cairo, Ross. Your comment pretty much lines up with what I feared. It seems to make no sense at all that Trolltech are using their own drawing API. I can’t imagine this is for cross-platform reasons as Cairo has been developed for cross platform interoperability. I am going to poke a few Trolls to see if I can find out more about this.