unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Frederik Nnaji
<frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi David, your mockup looks pretty.. becoming more like a hybrid between our
> notification bubbles and and interactive progress indication dialog..
> i like the visual  this is taking!
>

Come to think of it, I recall some recent talk upstream for GTK+ to
have themes provide a light and dark mode. An application could
request the dark version if it needed to provide cleaner colours to
display photos, for example. (Which is nonsensical to me. Am I really
the only one that thinks white makes a more useful backing for a
photo?).

Ubiquity currently uses a dark background for its progress window,
too. If some kind of consistent approach could be adopted where any
quiet informational thing (progress bars, unmounting drive, backing
up, launching Firefox, non-blocking Properties window) was given a
unique style like that, the desktop could be quite spectacular to look
at, and consistent with other notifications (like tooltips, even!), as
Frederik suggests.

Maybe the theme could look at a window's type hint to do it.
Unfortunately, GDK_WINDOW_TYPE_HINT_DIALOG doesn't quite fill the
niche I described since preferences dialogs (and a random seeming
assortment of other things - I wish developers paid more attention to
these!) also set that hint.
To do this one may need to invent a spec extension and patch a lot of
apps, at which point it probably wouldn't be worth it :/

I guess MacOS has dark windows and light windows following some kind
of pattern, too. Anyone know what theirs is?


Thanks!
Dylan