Review Request: Desktop Settings Theme Details

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 06 October 2008, Jamboarder wrote:
> > > I think this does not belong into desktop settings. How about doing it
> > > in a separate application for theme designers? it wouldn't clutter one
> > > of our primary userinterfaces this way...
> >
> > agreed... having a workspace/plasma/tools/desktopthemedesigner would be
> > great, though
>
> No problem, I can make the new tab into a separate app.  Would a kcm for
> this be ok?

don't see why not; it can be loaded from a kcm into a stand alone app easily 
enough.

> As a user, I think it would be
> convenient to be able to easily change, say just the analog clock or the
> panel background to one I downloaded from KDE look, or to one I prefer from
> a different theme.   I think the use cases are similar to the colors kcm
> but for the plasma theme.  It's kinda all-or-nothing right now.

.. which is ok for most people. how many people go through and tweak their 
colours in the colour kcm one by one?

the granularity of these configurations is, imho, completely wrong right now in 
kde for general use cases. plasma tries to address this by introducing some 
sanity to it, and i won't have it go back to kicker-style "what kind of 
background would you like for 'special' versus 'application' buttons?"

what you are talking about here is absolutely a designer and power-tweaker 
tool.

> Also, if it's relatively easy for the user to change then it might motivate
> more theme-authors who are only willing or able to focus one thing (a
> really cool clock or panel) but who might not be willing or able to do an
> entire theme.

of course, if you only create a cool clock face or a cool panel, everything 
else defaults back to the default theme. you don't have to create a "full 
theme" even today.

i do see an advantage to allowing people to create just individual pieces and 
have other put them together, but let's be honest and realize that this is a 
"tweaker's delight" feature and not a general user feature. that doesn't make 
it bad, it just gives us guidance as to where we should place it and what we 
should expect from it.

> So I was rather hoping this would be not too difficult to find for the
> user.  I hoping a kcm (even if its under "Advanced") would be ok for this
> reason.

i honestly think we ought to have a "tweaker's systemsettings", and vastly 
simplilfy the existing desktop ones.

this new plasma theme creator kcm would be perfect for the "tweaker settings" 
app, as would the current colour scheme dialog (which could really be replaced 
with a list of existing themes and a way to get new themes)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

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