ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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?
>

Hi Alan,

I think the answer here is simply that the roadmap for the HTML5 story for
the first phones has focused on providing a working Ambiance theme to match
the QML theme rather than having an extensible theme framework.

In terms of shipping the Ambiance theme locally in the click package, I'm
not sure this is something that we're recommending in the documentation. I
know that we are looking at making it easier for developers to fetch the
HTML5 Ambiance theme corresponding to a given framework, so that they can
ship it in their clicks if they want to do so, but I'm not aware of
conversations about making this the preferred option.

The webapps folks can probably give us more insights here.


>
> 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.
>

I'll defer commenting on how this could be accomplished with webapps to the
experts, but could you not do this today already by writing an HTML5
"admin" app (as opposed to a remote webapp) that uses the Wordpress, Joomla
or whichever API?

Cheers,
David