From kde-artists Tue Mar 21 19:54:54 2000 From: Michael Reiher Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 19:54:54 +0000 To: kde-artists Subject: Re: Default style [was Re: kdelibs/kstyles/b3plugin] X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-artists&m=95366849327868 My opinion to the default theme: Independent from whether I like the B* style there is one thing that bothers me about it. It looks like BeOS(surprise:). KDE 1.x always looked like exsisting toolkits, Windows and Motif. We have now the great technical possiblity to create a default look for KDE how ever we want. And now that we have it we make KDE per derfault look like another OS. I mean there is nothing wrong to emulate existing toolkits But what I would really like to see is a default look that is unique to KDE. (Perhaps even in a low and a highcolor version.) And that we can keep with only slight modifications for quite some time. Someday people will know it. Screenshot in magazines or demo boxes at fairs often use KDE as it comes out of the box. At the moment they might wonder 'is this windows or what??'. With a unique KDE look they see a screenshot and know right away 'This is KDE'. Or at least they know that is none of the common OSses. Some time ago there was a mail (I think from Mosfet) encouraging people to write styles. But AFAICS nothing happend. Perhaps the problem is that the styles need to be *written*. But many artistically talented people are no programmers. I tried to program a style myself but I failed on the *artistic* stuff. Well, I´m no artist:) So what I would propose is a kind of a goint venture between artists and developers. Artists can do the styles as pixmaped themes and some developers can hack it into code then. Yes, I would volunteer for that part. I think that would give the best results in terms of good look on the one hand and speed, effects on the other hand. The artist mailing list would perhaps serve as a good forum. There´s not much traffic anyway. What do you think? Comments? Opinions? Flames? Greets Michael -- Michael Reiher Student at Dresden University of Technology Department of Computer Science email: michael.reiher@gmx.de "Beware the woods at night, beware the lunar light!"