unity-design team mailing list archive

[Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, June 07, 2010 11:11:32 am Ted Gould wrote:
> 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.

I've attached a screenshot of rekonq in it's default configuration on Kubuntu 
Netbook Remix in Maverick.  It's address bar on the top and tabs on the bottom 
(the opposite of Chromium (I've never run Chrome, I assume it's similar), but 
it delivers, to my eye, a very similar experience.

It's lack of integration with my desktop is one of my two major dislikes I 
have for with Chromium.  I completely agree that better integration is 
important, I don't see how it relates to a requirement for CSD.  I think 
window managers can support the needed functionality.

> 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.
> 

Can't Kwin/Metacity/Compiz be extended to support this?  If it could, that 
would do a lot more for overall consistency than CSD.  Chromium is my one 
experience with CSD so far and it supports my concerns that once CSD is 
supported in GTK, there will be no consistency among applications on the 
desktop.

Scott K

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