Re: GNUstep's default theme...

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

On 09/12/13 07:29, Gregory Casamento wrote:

I've often felt as though our default look causes people to have a bad first impression of GNUstep.  

First impressions and "out of the box" experience have a huge impact. Many people make the mistake of believing we are ONLY OpenStep based on the look alone without really looking at the API.

Does anyone have any opinions on this?

I disagree... (not on the first impression thing of course). Many people don't even know what OpenSTEP and APIs are, thus don't worry.

I intended to write a cynic email about the typical topics we get when somebody looses confidence in the project, which I read again and again in the past 10 years. But let me write something more constructive.
Everytime theming is mentioned (as with other critical topics in this category) there is bla bla, but on the first moment of action needed fixing or coding to improve the situation, things will slow down.

As others wrote, we need to show themes, but that means we need to have themes! These themes need to be seen in screenshots, need to be packaged, need to be reasonably complete and usable!
It is much better not to release a theme than to release something badly usable: again, a matter of first impressions.

Now I did a test, I searched "google theming" with bing. Looking at the images, we do get screenshots! Our main screenshot is a dark themed image... we have blog posts. Thus it is fine. [First point: check how things really are, not how things think you are].

However... the 4th and 5th links are... devastating.

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Themes

If anybody interested in themes makes it up to that wiki page, he will run away scared :)

1) only one theme is directly mentioned, Silver (Kudos, German!)
2) there is no real "page" about Silver... the link is directly for a download
3) the rest are just a couple of links to GAP (where the landing page is also quite incomplete!), etoilé and some SVN links???
4) the real way of changing themes is clear only for people actually knowing what they are speaking about...

navigating more, goes to this page (even linked in our own wiki):
http://gnustep.blogspot.it/2008/01/system-preferences-and-theme.html

No images at all ;)

This is terrible, IMO. a couple of ideas for our wiki

1) this is the place where to put more screenhots, those that German likes :) and he is right in this case
2) the page should "cite" other themes with their own WIKI pages, not direct SVN links or tarballs
3) each major theme should have its own page with a screenshot, release instructions (akin of our Apps)
4) GAPs page should be updated too, it was a good start.... 3 years ago though :)
5) changing themes should be shown, through our info-panel per application and through system-preferences

And of course, if the gnome and windows theme were in better shape they could be released at leas in a "0.1" stage which could allow for better screenshots, pages...

Riccardo