GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 82190
Gnome CD should not have it's own themes
Last modified: 2006-08-25 12:42:31 UTC
Since gnome-cd is part of the core gnome desktop it should be completely themable through gtk for accessibility reasons. Bill at sun has been pretty strict on his interpretation of the law stating that all theming must be based on a central system theme. note: Yes i do not think nautilus should have it's own themes either.
I don't personally really think that this is worth blocking any GNOME release over, but Bill and wipro should be aware of this issue; upping. In the general case, I'm sure it would help a lot more if the stock GNOME icons had generic media player icons; I'm cc'ing the art dudes because that is something they may want to think about going forward.
The icons used by default are from Tigert's icons page, but when the API for GTK froze, so did the icons that could go in, so these icons are from the official collection :)
louie: agreed this is minor in the sense that gnome-cd theme problems aren't a big enough issue to block a gnome2 release, especially considering that the nautilus icon view might as well be consindere inaccessible since it's not themed at all by gtk i believe (except for fonts). Also i was refering more to the display color background, which is a really cool red right now. but is set by the gnome-cd theme. It would be cool if the effect was achieved using the gtk theme color and maybe a transparent pixmap to create the lined effect. Someone on gnome news mentioned this last week, and this actually motivated me to file this bug.
Hmm, interesting idea
I dunno, this is more "wishlist". Anyone got any complaints?
Ian, i would have no problem punting this for sometime post 2.0. However i do think it should be done eventually..
I think we need to decide what to do ASAP even if the fix is put in for 2.0.X instead of 2.0.0. Basically any app that uses pixmaps/PNGs/images in a theme-like way needs to either be rewritten to reflect GTK+ themes (i.e. use theme engines to do the drawing) or be based on icons pixmaps which themselves can be themed. This is especially true in the case where the graphics are mostly eye candy. An alternative for apps whose maintainers simply cannot live without the nifty cool custom graphics and who won't either convert them to use themeable "icons" or gtkstyle drawing commands would be to allow a "uses GTK+ theme" option which would then probably become the default on destops where accessibility was an expected option (i.e. multiuser logins, kiosks, educational settings, etc.). The reason we haven't given a "formula" for what we'd like you to do (Iain) is that we don't want to tell you how to code your app, just what we need the end result to do :-) -Bill
Can I just clarify that if this accessibility theme looks ugly, then I'm not going to set it as the default. Ever.
Created attachment 9097 [details] gnome-cd "accessibility theme" in tar format.
Attached above is a gtk accessibility theme. The gnome-cd will respond to gtk themes if the above theme is selected.
This accessibility theme looks pretty nice with my aqua pixmap theme. My only request is could it use the much nicer icons from the media theme. I believe these are the icons that are meant to be added to gtk eventually, and they are much nicer looking. Only other comment i have is that maybe the resolution of the pixmaps used to draw the borders could be increased. Since the corners especially look somewhat jagged. Other than that great job.
Created attachment 9160 [details] Updated accessibility theme with the icons taken from media theme
Hi Bordoley, Thanks for the inputs. I have updated the accessibility theme with the icons from "media theme". The above patch is in tar format. I was not able to change the resolution of the pixmaps. Any special option for this in Gimp that I am missing ?
Rajkumar: Maybe tigert or jimmac can give you advice with the pixmaps. I don't really know much about gimp, but the corners look sort of jagged. Maybe adding some nice anti-aliasing to the corners would look nice (i know either tigert or jimmac had a tutorial on this available..eg. how to create an antialias effect using the gimp) also thought about this last nite, why doesn't gnome-cd register it's buttons with the stock icon system. If i'm not mistaken, wouldn't this allow the gnome-cd buttons to be themed using the standard gtkrc theming mechanism. I know galeon registers quite a few icons with the stock system that aren't part of the gtk defaults. (maybe i'm not understanding this completely though)
Yeah, I was thinking about doing that. I was also thinking about registering the pixmaps that make up the display so it can all be changed from a gtkrc. My only concern then is how does one change the theme except by editting the gtkrc file?
Ian: Regarding the buttons, i think doin them via the stock system is probably the right thing to do. gtk will add the media icons to it's stock icons eventually, so forcing users to edit gtkrc files to edit the icons really isn't that big of a deal (and we won't get upset users who's old theme icons no longer work, assuming others create gnome-cd themes, when switching to using the gtk-stock icons) Regarding the pixmap background, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I like how the current mechanism works (assuming the use system theme option is the default). With my aqua pixmap theme, the display looks quite nice, granted, that with the default gtk theme, it doesn't look quite as great. However,if we make theme switching easy in the ui, i think this is ok. I think using the stock system here is a little overkill probably
I agree that the pixmaps should be part of the stock icon set. Though it's not ideal perhaps to have this level of interdependence between apps and themes, I think it's the best we can do with the current icon-theming API. Right now the way we do icon theming is: add the icon to the stock set, then each RC-file theme specifies replacement pixmap files for the stock icons, including these "app-stock" icons. I don't see a good alternative that works with RC-file theming, at least at this time.
Bill: Are you saying that the background pixmaps should be themed using gtkrc. To me that seems like overkill. Imho as long as the button icons are themed using gtkrc, and we have a sane use default gtk theme preference for the display, i think this is fine. Nothing really inherintly wrong with having independent theming of the display background, since users could pass around some cool themes. But everything should by default use gtkrc (as the display does when using this accessibility theme)
bordoley: I agree with you about the background, I was talking about the icon pixmaps.
Oh, thats all people are worried about...? Oh thats okay, I thought everyone wanted the background to be controlled from gtkrc files as well.
Iain: my only concern vis-a-vis the background is that one be able to easily turn it off. Ideally that would itself be themable, or at least gconf'ed, or else background off by default (the third option probably being unattractive to you). I don't care about being able to "theme" it in the sense of being able to provide a replacement background in the RC file. We may want to consider a gtksettings variable "UseBitmaps=false" or something like that, to tell apps not to use fancy bitmaps for backgrounds or painting of other elements; that would make it easy for "Accessibility" themes to turn off backgrounds and other hard-to-theme bitmaps.
bill the theme is stored in gconf. Here's my proposal( basically just a rehash of our conversation so far) 1. Buttons use stock icons. Currently gtk doesn't offer any media icons, so gnome-cd should register these icons. preferably using an icon name that can be used universally in gnome, so other media apps like rythmbox will all use the same stock icon. eg. gnome-media-forward etc. (In fact this raises a larger question perhaps gnome it self should have a superset of stock icons that are not part of gtk, does it already?) 2. The default theme in gnome-cd should be the one Rajkumar did (basically a set transparent pixmaps that is used to draw the background border) so that the background of the display is set using the gtk theme. (I would like to see this fixed up a bit so that the corners don't look so jagged, actually i think some of the other icons could use some tigert and jimmac love too. The media icons are awesome though). 3. Gnome-cd can include other themes for the background, but the user must explicity set these using the theme chooser in gnome-cd preferences
I think libgnomeui or gtk needs to include those media icons since they are used in a variety of apps already. think gnome-record, gnome-cd, rhythmbox ... Including them for each app isn't really an elagant solution..
Jorn: How about if we (the developers who are using these icons) share the same names for the stock icons, then soeone only has to change it once in the gtkrc file? They're not going to get included into the main gtk/libgnomeui until the next API additions are allowed (2.2 I think), so this is probably the best solution till then.
yeah, that would be a good temporary solution. How about: gnome-media-next >| gnome-media-previous |< gnome-media-forward >> gnome-media-rewind << gnome-media-stop [] gnome-media-play > gnome-media-pause || gnome-media-eject?
Bordoley: I have updated the theme with sharp border lines and smooth corners. Iain, would like to know if someone has started working on "registering media-themes as stock icons" ?
Created attachment 9346 [details] Updated theme in tar format.
Created attachment 9347 [details] Here's a screenshot to prove that this theme looks good overall
Rajkumar, I just updated the theme. Still have some aesthetic issues. Please see my attached screenshot as well. Basically some of the lines appear to be missing pixels. This is really obvious if you zoom in closely. Also the corners still look too jagged and not round enough. Also they don't all appear to be drawn the same. Keep up the good work...
Attached is a tar file containing a set of pixmaps which fixes both these issues, as far as I can see. I've also changed the pixmaps for the buttons-- removing the gradient shading effect, which isn't so good if this is our 'accessibility' theme (although what I've replaced them with doesn't really work for low-contrast themes, unfortunately, only regular and high contrast themes-- but that's kind of a separate issue). I've also changed the icons for the pop-up menu to be the same, but this doesn't appear to have any effect :/ Finally, I've also attached new versions of disc.png, once.png, repeat.png, and track.png (which all go in prefix/share/pixmaps/gnome-cd), as the ones in the RC1 build look pretty grotty-- it looks like they've been drawn bigger and scaled down. These ones are somewhat cleaner, I think.
Created attachment 9428 [details] Tar file containing complete set of pixmaps for 'Current-GTK-Theme'
Created attachment 9429 [details] Tar file containing cleaner disc.png, once.png, repeat.png and track.png
BTW, rather than "Current-GTK-Theme", could we maybe call this theme "Current-Desktop-Theme" instead? We don't really refer to "gtk" anywhere else on the desktop.
Oops, I see why the icons on the menu didn't change, hadn't edited the .theme file...
two things: 1. Why not call the "current gtk theme" just "default". 2. Since we've seemed to agree that icons should be themed via the stock system instead of the current mechanism, shouldn't the default icons be the pretty ones, and the more accessible high contrast ones can be included in an accessible gtk theme? (I'd be really against making the black and white ones the default as they are ugly...)
1. I don't think Iain is prepared to make this theme the default (although the Sun distro probably will, at least), so calling it "default" might be somehwat misleading... I dunno. I've always thought "default" was a word we should keep out of users' faces anyway, it's kind of geeky :) 2. I agree in principle, but until gtk actually supports that sort of thing (and resizable icons as part of the theme), we need an interim accessible solution. Again, if this isn't going to be the default theme for gnome-cd, then most users probably aren't going to see these icons anyway, or at least not more than once :) (I'm also happy to have a go at making these button icons less ugly whilst maintaining their 'shows up against any background' property, or for anyone else to do the same-- consider the attached ones to be a first attempt to make sure we at least had *something* there...)
I'll make it the default theme if it looks good. And yes, the button pixmaps will be themed from gtkrc, so an accessible theme should just set the accessible versions in there. And yes, we desperatly need better icons for the little symbols
And in that tarball of icons, the disc.png is broken
ian it really can look good if a user is using a nice gtk theme. See my screenshot. Though I will admit that lcd area doesn't look quite as good with the default gtk theme, but in all fairness the default gtk theme doesn't really all that hot either.
Created attachment 9458 [details] Tarball with uncorrupted versions of disc.png and the other symbols (thanks Raj!)
Created attachment 9459 [details] Theme tarball now expands to a directory to called 'Default', in the hope that Iain will make this the default theme :)
Created attachment 9460 [details] Some slightly more attractive default buttons that should still be accessible with high/low contrast themes
Iain, the above theme addresses the core issue of this bug. I guess this bug could be closed with this theme and a new bug should be filed for any other issues (if any).
When this bug is resolved, does that mean that the themes listbox in the cd player prefs will disappear? I was just about to file a new bug for the visibility of the listbox items, see bug 85518.
Reinout the ultimate impact of this bug is the following: 1. All icons (eg the context menu icons and buttons) should be themed using the gtk stock system and should be standardized across gnome apps. Therefore gnome cd themes should not include button icons. 2. the lcd background should by default use the gtk theme color or pixmap (see my screenshot with the aqua theme it looks nice). If iain decides he wants to maintain themability of the lcd using other pixmaps, that is up to him as long as the default is themed via gtk.
Raj, can we make sure the 'default gtk' theme at least gets into a sun patch, if this issue isn't resolved in time for Sun FCS.
Calum, 'default theme' is already there as a sun patch.
Oops, so it is... it just doesn't seem to be the default at the moment. Will ask our RE team to fix this.
Oops (again)... I don't see this in sun-patches at all, I was picking up the theme from a different build. And it's not in our branded nightly, which it should be if it's in sun-patches. What's the patch filename?
ah, hang on, you said this was a D2 patch, didn't you. Don't think we have those in our builds yet.
Am updating a customized patch which uses the PNGs filed by Calum above. It has two parts a) A diff file for the changes in 'gnome-media/configure.in' b) A tar file of 'gnome-media/gnome-cd/images' which contains the proposed 'default-theme' along with other existing themes (lcd, media, red-lcd).
Created attachment 10458 [details] [review] The diff file as mentioned above.
Created attachment 10459 [details] Tarball of gnome-cd images directory with proposed default theme.
Updating status_whiteboard field to reflect A11Y team's assessment of accessibility impact.
feeback on this patch solicited, it's been >7 months!!!
This should really be looked at NOW. Freeze is imminent.
This a11y stopper bug would be nice to fix before the July 7th UI freeze deadline.
Need a go-ahead approval from maintainers and pinging for the same... Thanks.
Apparently iain has stop maintaining gnome-media, I would consult with the release team about this bug.
There's a new maintainer ted at gould cx Reassigning the bug so he gets the mail about it
Added the new theme in, and set it as the default for the schema. I decided to name it 'None'. Default didn't really seem to fit, and didn't really explain what it was. I think that 'None' works because that is what the user is going to think of it as. It is really just not changing what the user will normally expect to see, which is something that matches their GTK+ theme.
reopening at a lower priority, since there are still a couple of unthemed graphics (or, at least, graphics that don't match the icon theme/high-contrast etc.) namely, the disc and forward arrow icons (i.e. the last set Calum submitted). Looks like this part of the patch wasn't applied ? Note that these graphics need to resize according to the value of "gtk-icon-size" as specified in the current RC file/theme.
Apologies for spam-- ensuring Sun a11y team are cc'ed on all current a11y bugs. Filter on "SUN A11Y SPAM" to ignore.
changing version number as it is still true for 2.12
Apologies for spam... ensuring Sun a11y folks are cc'ed on all current accessibility bugs.
Closing this since the patch doesn't apply any longer and the theme got in. Combined with a vague description of this bug etc this is just confusing. Please file a new bug against gnome-cd if there are still problems with a11y and gnome-cd theming.