GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 645920
Provide a default Adium theme
Last modified: 2018-05-22 14:42:24 UTC
HTML is a good way to display chats and we already support Adium themes which are the de-facto standard for HTML chat themes. I think we should move away from our old chat themes and provide a default Adium theme. This theme should be sexy and well integrated with GNOME's default theme. For the record, Ubuntu already ships its own theme based on Renkoo iirc: https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adium-theme-ubuntu Ideally, it would be good to have 2 themes: one for private chat and one for muc (see bug #595318) but we can start with the private one. Some help/input from the GNOME design team would be welcome to help us in this task.
Created attachment 184680 [details] ubuntu ttheme Here is a screenshot of the Ubuntu theme. Starting from it is probably a good idea as that's, afaik, the only theme having a clear licence (they asked to the original author of the Renkoo theme).
I can't put my finger on what exactly I don't like about the Ubuntu theme. I think the main problem is that the bubble colours and shapes don't match anything else on my desktop. I also don't think I need to see the exact second every message was sent and received at; and the bubble points are never going to match up to the mouth of the contact's avatar so they look weird to me. I think if there are any boxes around messages within the window, the backgrounds of the boxes should probably match the document background colour (namely white), and the space around the boxes should be some other colour? It's interesting to note that in this mockup by Jakub <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24178/empathy.png>, outgoing and incoming messages in the conversation window are distinguished only by being in grey versus black text. I'm not sure whether that would actually work. (I am not an artist or designer.)
Created attachment 187374 [details] theme mockup I have to admit that I like the Ubuntu theme quite a bit, but it doesn't fit into the Gnome Shell overall layout. I attached a mockup that I made from the PGO design by Vinicius Depizzol and Alberto Ruiz (so no copyright issues here ;). The benefit of this design would be that its color is mainly white & gray and therefor will match with a lot of different desktop themes. The disadvantage would be that it doesn't match the colors and design of the bubbles that the user already knows from the new messaging tray (white on black, transparency, sharp bubble points). Actually I don't like the idea of white font on black background because it's IMHO much harder to read. I removed the date from the conversation bubbles and added it as a separator between the bubbles (like skype does it). Don't know if this is possible with the current themeing. If someone wants to have an xcf which has separated text and graphics, let me know and I'll attach this too.
Surely we should display the avatar rather than the presence icon. :) Your mockup could be a good start. From an implementation pov we could start from Ubuntu's theme, as afaik, that's the only theme having a clear license. From the top my head, a quick shopping list of things the theme should support: - Mark the difference between our own messages (we sent) and the ones we received - Display avatars of both contacts - Display archived messages in a different way (see the screenshot in Comment #1) - Display the date/time of messages; see bug #586980 for the time format supported - Mark new messages which have not been read yet (using maybe a line splitting the new messages from the old ones) or marking each message (see the blue marker on http://willthompson.co.uk/misc/adium-unread-messages.png ).
(In reply to comment #4) > From the top my head, a quick shopping list of things the theme should > support: - Display /me messages in a different way to normal ones.
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