ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

right now the theme on the phone is located in 
/usr/share/ubuntu-html5-ui-toolkit/0.1/ambiance
the documentation shows how to create HTML5 apps that reference this 
directly
https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/apps/html-5/guides/html5-guide/

<!-- Ubuntu UI Style imports - Ambiance theme -->
<link 
href="/usr/share/ubuntu-html5-ui-toolkit/0.1/ambiance/css/appTemplate.css" 
rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Apparently it is now best practice to scoop this up and pop it in the 
click package of the application rather than reference it from the file 
system, either way, your application is locked for all time to version 
0.1 of Ambiance. If the phone grows some UI for changing the theme then 
some core apps might change but your HTML5 apps won't pick up the 
changes because they are still pointing at the old theme. If you change 
to a high contrast large font accessible theme then your applications 
won't change. We can't develop new themes as click packages and get the 
whole system to respect the theme, each application will do it's own thing.

Is this the actual design intention? We are locked forever into the 
aesthetic preferences of the design team?

I was kind of hoping that remote web applications could reference the 
theme assets of the device through some kind of Sass include, so I could 
write something like an admin module for Wordpress or Joomla or Vtiger 
or Odoo or Alfresco so that when you log on to your instance of this 
software on your Ubuntu server from your Ubuntu phone everything looks 
as native as the dialler, flip the theme on your phone and all your open 
source remote web apps respect that theme change. It now seems that 
there is, and will be, no theme changing on the phone, which is a bit 
odd, I was expecting to do something like <link 
href="http://localhost/ubuntutheme.css";> to pick up a Sass or less 
compiled stylesheet that reflected the currently selected theme of the 
device.

Alan.