unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 03:25 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Sunday, June 06, 2010 03:39:40 pm Ted Gould wrote:
> > On Sat, 2010-06-05 at 23:31 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > > So I think it's worth continuing the conversation.  I'm personally quite
> > > concerned that we are about to have a permanent split between GTK/Gnome
> > > and Qt/KDE on this topic that will make future work on desktop
> > > consistency much more difficult.
> > 
> > Why couldn't Qt support themes that specify the window title as well?
> > There's already work on keeping the theming across toolkits, it seems
> > like this just extends it.  I don't see this as creating a larger gap as
> > before to get consistency you need to make a GTK, Qt, KWin, Compiz and
> > Metacity theme (they pull from each other, but you need to check them
> > all) and now you just have to make a larger GTK and Qt theme. 
> 
> Near term you won't see any feature changes in Qt since the 4.7 beta is out 
> and we'll have 4.7 for Maverick and possibly Maverick +1.

Sure, but I think that implies that the change doesn't create a
"permanent split" more a "temporary split."  There's no reason that Qt
couldn't support CSD and I imagine that they largely do because of their
device support which won't have a window manager (no X).

> I'm still not seeing any real rationale for CSD other than it's easy to get 
> things done quickly.  

I think that the driving factor is consistency and integration;
consistency and integration between the application and it's title.

Let's look at Chrome.  They've created a very nice experience by
integrating the top level tabs with a half-height title bar.  This isn't
possible without CSD.  But, today it's on its own "theme island" and
there isn't a way that they could be consistent if they wanted.  To do
this next generation of integration, we need support in to toolkit to
make it consistent.

On the integration front, there is currently no way to reasonably make
the window have a texture that integrates cleanly with the title bar.
Even something as simple as a hash pattern would likely end up looking
awful much less something sophisticated like the brushed metal look in
many OS X applications.  I'm not saying we should do either of those,
but the fact that we can't is a little ridiculous.

		--Ted

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