Hello.
I'd like to give my point of view of the current state of Bluecurve and desktop integration in Fedora, focusing on the artwork.
-- The icon set --
The BC icon set is of course comprehensive and generally of very high quality, but there are areas where it is lacking: very small icons, 16x16 or 20x20, are often badly hinted. It looks like the 48x48 version has been scaled down, and a very sharp black edge has been added along the perimeter. Sometimes hinting is missing entirely, leaving a very blurry icon. Also, too much detail is crammed into the small icons.
Compare these two screenshots of the Gnome file selector:
http://petrix.se/fedora/fileselector_bluecurve.png
http://petrix.se/fedora/fileselector_gnome.png
The Gnome icons on the left are not only scaled-down versions of the larger ones, but completely redesigned. The Bluecurve Home and Desktop icons are good examples of down-scaled, black-outlined icons with too much detail, and the filesystem icons are missing hinting.
I think focus should shift from providing half-done icons for every single menu entry (Sound Juicer, XChat, etc) to improving the icons that make sense for cross-DE (desktop environment) integration, such as basic operations (open, close, home), navigation, RH/Fedora specific applications (system-config-*) and maybe a few main applications (web browser, email program). Build on top of the existing Gnome and KDE/Crystal icon sets, adding a unique "feel", instead of replacing 100%. Ximian Desktop only changed the folder icons and a handful of others, but along with the Gtk theme it made a huge difference. The KDE Crystal icons go very well with the BC icons, and KDE would benefit enormously from better 16x16 icons.
-- KDE/Qt --
KDE and Qt are obviously not the main focus of the Fedora desktop team, but the Bluecurve Qt theme was a pioneering effort. However, the version shipped with FC3 has a long list of rendering differences from the Gtk theme. I have personally done some hacking on the Qt theme, trying to bring it closer to the Gtk one:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=141125
None of it has yet shown up in Rawhide, despite being well received. A lot of 3:rd party commercial/scientific applications are written in Qt, and having a near-perfect Qt theme will add to the professional feel of a Red Hat/Fedora desktop.
Maybe Qt could be modified to use the Gtk file selector, when an environment variable is set?
-- OpenOffice.org/NWF --
The state of of NWF in OOo in 1.1.x, and also in 2.0, is promising at best. If it were up to me, I wouldn't ship it for a few more months. The widget coverage has increased in 2.0, but the quality of individual widgets is still very low.
http://petrix.se/fedora/OOo.png
Sizes, alignment, shapes, highlighting etc etc. Since the Open Office suite is such a prominent application, I believe more manpower should be thrown at the problem. I know this comes off very negative, and I do not mean to diminish the efforts of the NWF hackers (Dan W for example). It will look tremendous once it's done. It's just that 100% of the widgets are 50% finished, and it would look a lot better if 50% of the widgets were 100% done, and the rest were #ifdef-ed out until they are done.
A guide to hacking NWF would be great to attract outsiders, and a list of tricks to build the beast for limited (NWF-only) testing. Stuff that can be ./configure-ed out, ccache etc.
-- Firefox/Thunderbird (XUL) --
FF/TB look fairly good already, but have a number of annoying rendering bugs. Submenu arrows, icons alignment on buttons and so on. Better icon coverage in the menus would also be nice -look at the Industrial theme, it has icons for nearly every menu entry:
http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2004/09/20/industrial-for-firefox/
-- Conclusion --
So let me sum up:
* Fewer, but better Bluecurve icons. Focus on the small ones.
* Fix the Qt theme. Patch and bug list in Bugzilla. Not complete, but a good start.
* More manpower to OOo/NWF, it's farther behind but very important.
* Better icon coverage in menus/preference dialog in FF/TB.
/Peter Backlund
Peter Backlund wrote:
I'd like to give my point of view of the current state of Bluecurve and desktop integration in Fedora, focusing on the artwork.
-- The icon set --
The BC icon set is of course comprehensive and generally of very high quality, but there are areas where it is lacking: very small icons, 16x16 or 20x20, are often badly hinted. It looks like the 48x48 version has been scaled down, and a very sharp black edge has been added along the perimeter. Sometimes hinting is missing entirely, leaving a very blurry icon. Also, too much detail is crammed into the small icons.
Compare these two screenshots of the Gnome file selector:
http://petrix.se/fedora/fileselector_bluecurve.png
http://petrix.se/fedora/fileselector_gnome.png
The Gnome icons on the left are not only scaled-down versions of the larger ones, but completely redesigned. The Bluecurve Home and Desktop icons are good examples of down-scaled, black-outlined icons with too much detail, and the filesystem icons are missing hinting.
comparing the two icon sets, you will see two different approaches: the Gnome ones are made at bitmaps, requiring a complete redesign for various sizes; the Bluecurve icons are made in vectorial format (Adobe Illustrator), which means at resize only minor adjustments are needed. unfortunately, as you observe, this adjustment was not made or is not good enough. i would like something else: the icon set made in a *free* scalable format, permitting contributors to work with affordable free tools (ideally with tools included in Fedora Core). back when Bluecurve was created, this was not possible, but, IMO, now a tool like Inkscape was matured enough, is good enough to be used to create a complete icon set, and as part of Fedora Extras is accessible to potential contributors. note: in a future fully Cairo accelerated desktop make sense to have a SVG icon set.
-- OpenOffice.org/NWF --
The state of of NWF in OOo in 1.1.x, and also in 2.0, is promising at best. If it were up to me, I wouldn't ship it for a few more months. The widget coverage has increased in 2.0, but the quality of individual widgets is still very low.
OOo 2.0 is still under heavy development, both at Red Hat and upstream and NWF is part of this ongoing development. as the OOo release is still at least two months away, there is time for visible improvements.
Sizes, alignment, shapes, highlighting etc etc. Since the Open Office suite is such a prominent application, I believe more manpower should be thrown at the problem. I know this comes off very negative, and I do not mean to diminish the efforts of the NWF hackers (Dan W for example). It will look tremendous once it's done. It's just that 100% of the widgets are 50% finished, and it would look a lot better if 50% of the widgets were 100% done, and the rest were #ifdef-ed out until they are done.
here i don't agree: 50% of widgets done and the rest untouched look very inconsistent. take as an example the OOo iconset as included in FC3: half Bluecurve and half Industrial: http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/ooo-bluecurve.png IMO, this floppy icon example is very good: having access to the icons source (which as i said before, is AI) any contributor can produce a Bluecurve version of the second icon in less than one minute (just add a black triangle to the save one)
-- Firefox/Thunderbird (XUL) --
FF/TB look fairly good already, but have a number of annoying rendering bugs. Submenu arrows, icons alignment on buttons and so on. Better icon coverage in the menus would also be nice -look at the Industrial theme, it has icons for nearly every menu entry:
http://linuxart.com/log/archives/2004/09/20/industrial-for-firefox/
i agree: the default browser should make full use of the icon set used on the desktop (and not introduce a new style of icons)
-- Conclusion --
So let me sum up:
well, as you may know, the look of FC3 was seriously lacking partly because the author of the original Bluecurve has left Red Hat around FC2 release time and it was a few months until they found a replacement.
i believe the best solution is to increase the community involvement in maintaining and creating the icon theme
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org