I really like the idea of the random evolving wallpaper, and your nice hack proves that the desired effect does work in practice.
One word of warning - if this feature finally gets included in Ubuntu, please make sure that the orange highlights are always kept subtle and never run out of control.
In Owens' demo the generated wallpaper looks great mainly because it contains very few and faded orange splashes. On the other hand, the original wallpaper that generated so much controversy contains no less than three big, highly saturated stains.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/ubuntu-1010-default-wallpaper.html
The new Ubuntu color palette takes an aggressive stance by combining purple and orange. While this combination can achieve a vibrating effects in the hands of a skilled designer, it's simply too risky to use in a random generator. So please put a constraint so that the orange highlights are always restricted to low saturations.
You know what would be great? Having the random wallpaper to use other palettes, as defined by the colors in the chosen interface theme, with the same highlights in the same position of the fresh install wallpaper. This would allow for even more variability of the shared screenshots (the original goal of this idea) from the first day, while keeping the branding still recognizable.
On 3 September 2010 19:51, Martin Owens wrote:
Hey Joseph, Mark and Otto,
On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 15:52 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Martin hit the nail on the head - the gap between what's on the CD,
> what
> works in practice, and the SVG standard, is rather wide.
demonstration which works on the default lucid install:
http://doctormo.org/2010/09/03/random-genetic-wallpaper/
So I may have been too hasty with my initial concerns. I think so long
as the svgs limits are known, it should be possible to do something even
more interesting than what I have done here.