GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 670490
Integrated toolbar + titlebar doesn't look very consistent
Last modified: 2013-02-22 20:54:43 UTC
Some nice new designs for GNOME 3.4 apps integrate the titlebar and toolbar. This looks great, but the implementation is new and has some inconsistencies in the theme. I'm basically using Epiphany as an example here, but these suggestions should apply to other apps in the future too. 1) there's a gradient in the titlebar (from #FFFFFF to #EDEDED) but none in the toolbar's background (solid #EDEDED). Ideally the titlebar+toolbar area should feel like one, the application chrome, the gradient should reflect that as well, starting at the top the titlebar and ending at the bottom of the toolbar. 2) The padding in the titlebar adds to the padding in the toolbar. So for example, vertically the padding looks something like this: 10px WINDOW TITLE 10px 4px TOOLBAR BUTTONS 4px In the middle there we end up with 14px. A quick fix would be to remove padding from the "top" of the toolbar, leaving it only for the left, right and bottom sides. The problem with that solution is that the toolbar would then look inconsistent in maximized windows that hide the titlebar. I think it's also worth having the same padding in the titlebar and toolbar. So with the quick-fix it would look like: 6px WINDOW TITLE 6px 0px TOOLBAR BUTTONS 6px And the same padding could be used between toolbar buttons for consistency. Horizontally, Epiphany's toolbar looks like this: 4px BACKFWD 12px URL 12px MENU 4px Suggested would be: 6px BACKFWD 6px URL 6px MENU 6px
killing the top padding inside the toolbar will make toolbar buttons vertically not centered on windows maximized w/o a titlebar, so it's not doable.
Also a gradient on the toolbar should end (at the bottom)in #EDEDED otherwise it won't "connect" nicelly to the tabs background when there are tabs visible. At a certain point we had a 3 point gradient (#EDEDED - darker - #EDEDED) like the needed one on menubars but it looked weird so we opted it out and used a plain color.
(In reply to comment #2) Using more of GNOME 3.4 I'm now liking the current titlebar+toolbar integration a lot more, specially using the other newly designed apps (Documents, Boxes, Contacts). I think Epiphany stands out a little more since the toolbar is way more crowded than the titlebar right now, so it's more apparent that they're two different things instead of feeling like one. I think when the new design (Web) is completely implemented it will look significantly better! I guess we can disregard that issue completely. (In reply to comment #1) > killing the top padding inside the toolbar will make toolbar buttons vertically > not centered on windows maximized w/o a titlebar, so it's not doable. Do you think GTK+ apps that integrate the toolbar with the titlebar could pass a hint to mutter so it knows to only draw padding at the top of the titlebar title?
I think everything is possible :-) Not right now though. I think the proper solution to the "integration" problem could be client side decoration, this needs some thinkering still.
What Lapo says here; but I don't think this is the best place to track progress on client side decorations and header bars. Work is ongoing in libgd (GdHeaderBar), mutter and GTK to support this. Marking as a duplicate of the Mutter bug. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 693712 ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 694381 ***