Hi guys I’m Andrea Cimitan! ;)
Sorry for the delay but here we are, with an abundance of updates for Ambiance and its complementary bright theme, Radiance!
It has been a great couple of weeks for me, where I continued working jointly with our visionary design lead Otto Greenslade, who I would like to thank for everything: working with him is really an exciting and valuable experience… he is fun, and the more I work with him, the more comfortable I feel and that means improving our productivity day-by-day.
We appreciate your feedback, all your comments, ideas and requests… and we used it as a base for the evolution of the theme. One of the things I love about the open source movement and our challenge is that is so easy for you to get in touch with us so that you feel how simple it is participating in the future of the whole product. That’s absolutely a peculiarity of the free software world, a characteristic closed software doesn’t have and definitely something we should be proud of.
Now let’s go back to the stuff we are all most interested in! :)
Ambiance
We highlighted few of the things you suggested, and worked hard to implement them while keeping an eye to the design and respecting our visual identity. Our goal is always to achieve the best compromise between overall look and usability.
- The text color: it is darker over the same background, resulting in more readability.
- The selected taskbar button: it is darker so it looks more distinctive among other inactive windows.
- The inactive menuitem color: now it stands out more over the background.
- Progressbar: is flatter, simply because we prefer it :P
- Spinbutton: it is larger, so it’s more clickable and looks more consistent with the rest of the theme.
- Scale: look at the new sound menu to see how it is… cool, isn’t it? :)
- Treeview: elements inside the treeview are using a small radius (previously they were squared).
- Calendar: just a minor fix, especially for the indicator-datetime.
- IconBox: now Appearance Preferences’s selection looks sweet… :)
- Toolbar: has 1 pixel of padding.
- Window borders: the corners at the bottom are now squared, benefits for window dimensions, alignment of the statusbar and resize gripper, other things I have in mind like future dark themes (trust me).
Radiance!
Radiance shouldn’t feel like a different theme, but more like a brother/sister to Ambiance, exhibiting some brighter touches.
Dark theme
As someone of you may know, with Gtk+ 3.0 applications could check and load the dark variation of a theme. That was *exactly* the idea behind the dark theme you have seen previously. Since there are no applications currently using this feature (but there will be in the future, imagine shotwell, f-spot, gimp, totem, whatever) for the moment we concentrated our efforts on the other two themes, but I think that I will continue working on this in the future months and then include this dark variation for both of them.
We need you!
As I wrote above, let’s love the free gift open source gives us: communication!
In particular, we appreciate your feedback on these topics:
- Scrollbars: are they really too tiny? what is your experience?
- MenuItems: do you feel they are slow? (not in GIMP, which seems slow for a different reason)
- Radiance, Radiance, Radiance!
For anything else, we are here – so don’t wait another second before submitting your feelings, or to thank us if you are in love with the progress we’ve made so far…
Thank you guys for the attention, see you with the next update!
Wow, that looks awesome!
Yes, the work it’s awesome!!
And yes, the Menuitems are too slow, on Firefox, on Ubuntu Menu.. Every Menuitems are too slow on Ambiance… I’m waiting for the new package for tray this update ;)
So, erm, where is the package? On Launchpad, I only see 0.1.6.8.
Will arrive soon, we are working on it.
Wow that looks amazing! Were can I get that? I tried the Murrine Daily Builds PPA but the Radiance theme isn’t there! :(
Also where can I get that wallpaper? It’s slightly different to the default wallpaper but I like the orange glows on it more :)
oh sorry didn’t see lucidfox’s comment :)
I get why the window border at the bottom isn’t rounded anymore. (Dark GTK theme app would look stupid if the bottom window border would try to use the bright bg color instead of the dark one.) But I personally liked the rounded bottoms on windows, it made them, I dunno, more fun? XD At least they seemed consistent with all the other theme elements, that are all rounded.
BTW I’m totally okay with the scrollbar width. My own theme (InSight) hides the scrollbar steppers, and even if you don’t do that, I think nowdays scrollbars most of the time only serve as showing the user where they are in a certain content, but they pretty much lost most of their interactive functionality to the mousewheel. So having a thiner one is acceptable.
This is an absolutely superb update of what is my favourite ‘Light’ theme. Excellent work, team. Can’t wait for the release. =D
FUCK YEAH! :) This should be default one. Dark menus are unprofessional.
I think it looks very good.
But, I hope the wallpaper can get a higher resolution so it also will look nice on bigger screens(like 1900×1200).
increasingly looks better, congratulations,but why the ambient is the default?. that design arguments you use to say that dark is better than light(irony by the name of themes).
in the other hand the window buttons are very flat compared with those of lucid. is also preferable that highlight the effects of passing the mouse over is now little contrast.
(but it looks really good. good work and remember, you can not make everyone happy)
Daniel.P
lightgraphite.com
Beautiful :)
I hope Radiance will become default
For the inpatients, the two themes are in launchpad. You need to update the engine as well.
For everyone else, Ken VanDine will update the packages soon, that will land in maverick.
The scrollbars are difficult to handle with a tablet or laptop trackpad. IMHO they should be wider.
Keep up the great work!
Observation note to theme creators >>>
Use a little darker text, something like 33,33,33
Observation note to DanRabbit >>>
Create little more lighter panel icons and emboss them like in Elementary
I demant perfection, i am UI fetishist :)
Hi,
please let this theme come true. It really really rocks. And BTW, it’s much sexier than Ambiance.
Greetz from Germany!
I see that icons in menus are blurred like in current Lucid themes. You need to set in theme GTK icons sizes in menus to 24, not 22pixels!
Will sometimes purple Human theme? Menu items such as the color of the upper bar here on the site? ;-)
Petr, purple is Canonical color, Ubuntu has orange. But don’t mind, you can change the selected bg color from your Appearance Preferences window
First off, thanks for actually replying in the comments, Andrea! Didn’t happen in the last post on the theme.
Thank you! That’s a nice update :)
Just why Radiance isn’t the default theme? Could you explain? I think that light themes look more professional. Merk in the comment in OMG!Ubuntu said: “I always wondered why Radiance wasn’t default. The rebranding of Ubuntu was all about “light”, yet the default theme is a dark one.”
If you ask about the speed, the earlier version of Ambiance theme was really slow in Ubuntu menu at least. I’ll check how it is after the update and will tell you.
For everyone willing to download the new themes on maverick :
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/0.1.7/+build/1935743/+files/light-themes_0.1.7_all.deb
Overall Theme is beautiful… BUT The background I think should change. I Assume it’s temporary?
Please excuse the harsh criticism, but those orange splotches on the background feels completely out of place and changes the background from mediocre to ugly.
Looks good!
But will the rounded corners on windows ever not be jagged?
> Since there are no applications currently using this
> feature (but there will be in the future, imagine
> shotwell, f-spot, gimp, totem, whatever)
Totem already uses it.
Now Radiance looks better!
Color of title bars and menu bars look good (better than the strange tone they had in Lucid).
Scroll bars’ width is ok for me.
Curious things: Why are tabs in gedit taller than in Appearance or in Messaging? I prefer the latter because they are smaller, more compact.
Monochrome panel icons in Radiance would look better in some lighter gray, say #606060 or even #707070.
Pet peeves: A more compact version of Radiance / Ambiance would be very nice. Those of us with crappy 1366×768 laptop screens would love it!
@Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo: it’s great to have communication between developers and users ;-)
@Børge A. Roum / forteller: unfortunately, not in time for maverick… maybe we will figure out a solution for Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04).
@Bastian: Hi my super French friend ;) Supercool to have that in Totem (I remember our conversation at the Pizza Express near St. Paul)! I hope to have the dark variation for maverick. I need to rewrite the gtkrc to be more modular before.
I finally have the new versions of the themes.
Ambiance is still slow.
Radiance is very fast.
In my opinion the background of radiance menus should be lighter. The color of panels is perfect, only background could be different (maybe less brown more grey and lighter.
And about the default theme once again: ambiance looks more like a finished one, so maybe it’s a better default theme for today. But after some (little) work with radiance it would be a better default theme.
Now about the wallpaper (if that’s the new default wallpaper): I just thought it will be a more different one. I liked lucid wallpaper just I was hoping some new fresh look in Ubuntu 10.10. A single default wallpaper can make a huge difference.
Don’t think I’m not happy with the changes. I think there is much important to say what could be better than what’s already perfect ;)
Is there a theme that makes title bars look like the rest of the window for a minimalist appearance like iTunes and Safari on OS X?
wow! congrats! i’m amazed… a true leap forward. it really looks like windows 98 with some orange and purple hues, now.
I love the new light themes for Maverick, they look way better than the old ones. And yeah, Ambiance is still having the slow menu-items issue, haven’t tried Radiance yet…
ScrollBars: for me it’s ok, but understand laptop users difficults.
MenuItems: all menu items are slow (glow performance issue).
Radiance is very beautiful!
Being a interface designer and all, I did my feedback visually. Rounded corners and a fuzzy icon: http://designalized.com/69/ubuntu-feedback.png
@Tor Løvskogen: Menu corners are very beautiful, but GTK+ can do this?
Who needs Mac OS X when you’ve got Ubuntu? Great work!
I like the new iterations very much. But for me, you made it this time a little bit too matt. I liked the satin sheen and the little indention in version 1.6.8 way more than it is now (different people-different tastes ;-) While the Lucid version was too much of gradients shadows and reflection, this time it is (at least for me) not enough bling. Maybe some light gradient to the light grey background like in the dark menus?
Keep up the great work Cimi!!!
DnaX – Don’t know. Could hardly be impossible.
Looks like a huge improvement over the Lucid theme. Especially the menus and window buttons.
The only problem I have, is that it is too hard to see the scroll bar grab handles. This is in-part to my older non LED LCD display. But it is till a huge issue for me.
@Tor, @DnaX: With gtk+/cairo this is possible… rendering-wise (see notify-osd or unity’s quicklists). But as far as I can tell it would require considerable amount of work in a theme-engine to get it right and work in all cases. Furthermore the rendering of the menu’s drop-shadow would also have to happen inside the theme-engine. CSD is once again the answer to this :)
The themes are really sexy… I love Radiance! But the default wallpaper not at all… I mean just read this page on Omg!Ubuntu! http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/ubuntu-1010-default-wallpaper.html I’m not the only one to think it should be changed!
Have to totally agree with the comment about a tablet, which I think will also apply to touch screens. Since we seem to be moving more and more to absolute point input devices, I think it’s worth investigating whether the current width is enough.
Love the theme though, looks are great already!
Congrats on the new theme. It’s looking great.
About the earlier comments on antialiased rounded edges:
If Emerald can do it, why can’t Metacity / Gtk-window-decorator implement it too?
This is pretty much the only reason I still use Emerald…
Both themes are terrific, and I agree that Radiance now has a much more professional look than Ambiance, and would probably fit better as default theme!!
Feedback:
- Notebook tabs look much better imo if you set focusstyle=3 (both Ambiance and Radiance)
- The through of the window buttons may need a bit of highlight in the lower part. At the moment I always think “what’s that dark spot above the buttons? a rendering glitch?”. And i think that the “x” needs a bit more relief: it looks flatter that the other 2 buttons because the background is red.
- progressbars without label are way thinner than progressbars with text inside. Oh, and they deserve just a bit of gradient on the through :)
- scrollbars are fantastic!! I don’t have any problems using my touchpad. But I understand that others may have…
- what about a look more like the focusstyle=2 for prelighted menuitems? (darker border, lighter bulk, a bit of roundness)
everything above was of course just imho ;)
Thank you for your hard work and for the wonderful results! :D
Hi,
Good work with the default theme. It represents the colors of Ubuntu/Canonical very well and nice. But I think radiance should be the alternative we haven´t got never before (Cool colors) Windows, Mac OS, RedHat and even the default Gnome and KDE Desktop themes, all use cold and simple colors like very light gray with blue, and I think that gives a good feeling when you spend too much time working on your PC.
Congrats for your work! You made Orange/Purple look so cool!! :D
Cheers
Mariano
IMHO the padding around the scollbars absolutely sucks (that separates them from the textarea in gedit for example). The same goes for the tabs. There are way to much lines in the theme.
Scrollbars: tiny!
MenuItems: what? not slow for me at all! (then again i have disabled compiz long time ago…)
Radiance: the gnome-terminal background “from theme” is too dark purple for radiance.
Thanks again for all your feedback.
It’s hard for me to believe that menuitems are fast in Radiance and slow in Ambiance, because they are using exactly the same style with a small difference for the border, which should not imply that slowdown. Are you sure it’s not related to AppMenu in maverick or so?
Hey, really love you, but you can’t be serious about that wallpaper, can you? Something that should be the eye catcher of a release shouldn’t look like random acid burns on pink jelly.
The border needs to grow some pixels.. maybe 5 or such
Who said this is the default wallpaper? Please stop discussing about the wallpaper, this blog post is about Ambiance and Radiance :-) A new blog post about future wallpapers and design decisions will follow next week.
Trust me again ;-) and please continue reporting your feedback to the main topics. (I am reading everything)
@Tor Løvskogen
Agree with you. Rounded menus are awesome.
Please refer to MacSlow’s comment for rounded menus. Unfortunately, with the current technologies, shadows are drawn separately by the compositing manager, which draws a squared shadow around menus. The application (in our case the Gtk+ engine) has no way to tell the compositing manager to draw a particular shape. Furthermore, when the compositing manager detects a RGBA window, it does not draw any shadow at all.
You can realize that to draw rounded menus we should be forced to utilize a RGBA window and ask the Gtk+ engine to draw the required shadow. That’s not the right approach. But don’t worry, future work on CSD will give us more power on a lot of exciting stuff (more power to me, more joy for you!).
The new Radiance is fantastic. Nice work! These updates also address 2/3 of my main concerns about the first iteration of the themes, which I’m very happy about!
The remaining criticism I still have is the size of the scroll bars. I do still think they’re too tiny and visually tacky and odd looking as a result in many cases.
They tend to look fine inside a dialogue or non-maximized window, or on the side of this comment box as I type into it. Little scrollbars seem to look nice in little windows. But in the larger maximized Firefox window that I’m currently in, it simply looks out of proportion and hard to see when it’s stretched out long along the side of the monitor.
It almost makes you wish you could scale the width of the scrollbar to the size of its window or something.
And of course, smaller size means smaller mouse/touch targets. That could be annoying.
You have to be kidding me, though I guess there’s no discounting an individual’s taste.
So I guess the Ambiance here is what? – a day at Disneyland or an orange grove..
You had something nice going on in lucid, now it;s just plain embarrassing
@Andrea Cimitan (or whoever knows): May I ask what CSD is?
Sorry, the speed of both themes in menus looks really the same… Maybe I tested ambiance with long menus and radiance with short ones when I said that. Actually there is no problem in ‘Applications’ menu, it becomes slower in ‘Places’ menu (however it’s almost ok), but when you open the long System->’Preferences’ menu, selecting of the menu items becomes very slow.
Like the theme in general, but I do have more than few issues with it.
The first is the lack of contrast in the menu font. Whether it’s the colour you’ve chosen or the font rendering, the text doesn’t jump out at me like the icons do.
Same goes for the active window font.
Why can’t I customise font colours by default from Appearance?
I prefer the new ubuntu font style but the font I’m using now; black DejaVu Sans Book 9 with only autohinting and everything else set to none is clearer.
The help and close buttons aren’t very radiant either, whether that’s because the windows are inactive it’s hard to tell.
I’d like to see some glistening effect added to give the windows some depth and radiance, they really don’t radiate…
I don’t like the sunken taskbar button one bit.
The whole theme needs more contrast in all areas and less dreary grey.
The space between the taskbar icons should be reduced.
The scroll bar and the edge of the window aren’t differentiated enough. Having to be single-pixel perfect in order to mouse resize at the edge of windows sucks.
I’m hoping the square window bottoms make it easier to resize but the corner dimples are almost non-existent.
Lastly, the alignment of the window controls could go left a little.
I appreciate all the work done making light themes so beautiful, but… can you make Ambiance borders like Radiance in this screenshot? “Borderless” borders are adding much more consistency to the interface; I like that beautiful shadow under the menubar font too :)
Great work!
Me encanta
I have reproduced the slower rendering speed of the menu. It’s not the menuitem being slow, but the nice glow around menu, because everytime you move the menuitem, the menu is going to be redrawn by Gtk+, and the glow requires CPU power. The only way to save performances is removing the glow effect, which is something I would like to avoid.
We’re not going to add more pixels on the left/right edge of the window borders, though we would like to make the resize gripper much more visible.
@CruelAngel: is client-side-decorations, window controls embedded and drawn by Gtk+ (theming engine) itself. That means anti-aliased corners too… it should be in Ubuntu 11.04.
Thanks for all your feedback, we are designer and we both have an obsession for pixels: we have already noticed most of the things you reported during the development, it’s just a matter of slow, progressive and continuous refinement. Your feedback is really important for us, we love to see what people dislike/like because that gives us an idea on which way to follow for the evolution of our work.
So keep up the communication and stay tuned.
Regarding windows buttons (close/max/min) IMHO they should be more plastic and look similar like radiobuttons or checkboxes..
The updated themes are much nicer:
The menus are nice and the highlight colour is an improvement.
The progress bar no longer looks toy like.
Window controls seem sharper.
I do think the scroll bar are too narrow though.
Sim
Hey there. You’re doing a good job. Many, many thanks for your collaboration with the community! =)
To give you some constructive criticism: Same colours for title, menu and navigation bar would let the themes look more consistent and clean (like elementary theme by DanRabbit).
I also dislike the Metacity buttons since they are too clunky in my opinion. “Lightweight” ones like the buttons used in the Shiki-Color themes are another option to give Ambiance/Radiance a simple, clean and light look.
What do you guys think about it?
I wonder, if this is not the default wallpaper. What is it being used for? It sure confuses some people.. ;-)
Hi Andrea, I would love to see a rounded edge on the taskbar items instead of a squared one, I think it would also fit better with the overall look of th theme (you can look ath the first modification here to understand what I mean https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Maverick/Radial).
I love the squared edges on windows’ bottoms (and also the thin line between the titlebar and the menubar), have you noticed the problem with rounded progessbars rendering (it’s explained in the link above)?
Contratulations for the good work!
I love these themes!
What I don’t like is:
- very hard to resize
- slowness in menus (but it’s faster than in previous version)
- progress bars have different heights in different applications (maybe it depends on an application, I don’t know)
- in some places text is shown on progress bars and in other is above them
- drop shadow between menu title and menu items like here: http://a.yfrog.com/img43/4198/gnuimagemanipulationpro.png (but I’m afraid it’s not doable to keep drop shadow around rest of the menu list and remove only in this place?)
Great work all together. Thank you!
I don’t know if it’s really a bug or so..date in clock indicator is really hard to read http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4305173/Screenshot-2.png
Great work! It keeps getting better. My comments:
- I liked better the rounded corners, found it more integrated with the rest of the theme;
- Active window text still needs more contrast;
- menu also needs more contrast;
- Fonts too big, low contrast;
- Wider scrollbars;
- too much space between the app indicators;a
- minimize and maximize should be darker;
- close, minimize and maximize should not be so close;
And again, great work!
To my previous post regarding windows buttons (close/max/min) IMHO they should be more plastic and look similar like radiobuttons or checkboxes.
Try to do something similar like Thallos VS for WinXP
http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs9/i/2006/038/4/9/Thallos_VS_by__kol.jpg
Alberto, the rendering for small progressbars has been fixed in the Gtk+ engine.
Thanks to everyone else: I’ve started writing a spreadsheet with all your suggestions, to see which of them are more popular.
Ehi Cimi!
My feedback:
I really like this theme, so I’ll just list what doesn’t convince me completely:
1. The disabled entries in menus are still hard to read
2. The tick in small checkboxes (e.g. the ones in Startup Applications > Startup Programs) seems to be different from the one in larger checkboxes, the first one is dove gray, the latter (I prefer this one) is nutmeg. It looks inconsistent.
http://i.imgur.com/hBwvT.png
3. Text on progressbar should be white for consistency with other stuff like selected file in Nautilus.
http://i.imgur.com/QqdAQ.png
4. Objects selected in an inactive window are hard to discern from unselected ones; e.g. select few files in a nautilus window in list view mode, then select another windows. Can you easily tell which ones are selected?
http://i.imgur.com/20EOv.png
5. The trough behind the window buttons is so subtle it makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to remove it entirely; it would be also more consistent because right now, when there is only the close button, no trough is shown.
6. The wallpaper is just awful. No, seriously. (but you probably have nothing to do with it)
I like the new radiance, but I think the color for the windows could be better, more colorful. Not as much as the vanilla color in lucid, but maybe a bit more colorful that the current gray.
And about the metacity, in my opinion, the arrow icons look better for the minimize and maximize buttons. But I guess it’s a design and usability decision.
Andrea, it’s great to know that progressbars rendering is fixed, so if i ask again for rounded items on taskbar will you do a RoundedItemsOnTaskbar++ in you spreadsheet? :)
It’s great to know that someone living near me (or have you moved away?) is so active in developing my favorite OS! :) I live near Venice! So “go Murrine go!”! :)
The wallpaper was average and just turned into the most amateuristic ugly thing ever.
I’m sorry to be so blunt. I really like the new improvements to themes. The lack of balance in Lucid is resolved now. And whether or not the Orange is in line with everybody’s taste: the implemention has (finally) become balanced and consistent.
But the wall-paper. It was average, and pretty random. But not distractingly out of place, cheap, and amateuristic.
It’s impossible to miss, and i’m not sure how the internal dynamic is of the design team; but considering you can’t all be clueless, I dare say a lot of you agree, that this wallpaper has to die.
It was originally intented to be an impressionistic interpretation of light and obviously chosen to not ‘intrude’ too much. (considering people also keep icons on the desktop)
Now it introduces. The original concept is completely lost. The composition is bad. The texture styles are not random as well.
It looks like a year old fingerpainted over the old wallpaper.
Please, kill it.
I’d like to report an issue with Ambiance I just noticed.
See this picture: http://omploader.org/vNWQwbw
Notice the menu bar. To the right of “Options” is a disabled menu item called “Send To” and you can just barely see it. Disabled menu items need to be a significantly lighter shade of gray.
The screenshot is of a Pidgin chat window.
@Meneer R: this blog post is not about the wallpaper, please stop commenting about it. A new blog post will follow next week. If you want to have a look at some of the wallpapers that will ship with maverick, click here: http://design.canonical.com/2010/08/this-week-in-design-27-august-2010/
@ssound: thanks for pointing this out, I will fix it for the next update.
For me too menuitems are slow. Very slow and very unconfortable…
Performance boost for the menuitems will come next week. I have figured out a way to improve the algorithm (it’s saturday, cimi please don’t work on saturday! :P)
Please upload these packages to Debian!
Very beautiful! At least Ubuntu will be the best looking Linux-Distro using gnome. But please check this theme out: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/MurrinaCrystal+II?content=116964
It uses much more effects. For example look at the blue outer line of the combobox-entry. You are the author of the engine so you are aware of the possibilities. We (the community) would be happy to see the full potential! Thank you for making our desktops looking beautiful and working on it comfortable.
In my opinion, the edge of the window (both themes) should be integrated more with the content. As I said, just my simple opinion.
I see you are a great team. Federico Leite says goodbye
Nice theme. Solid looking but not clunky. And I like the un-shininess.
In my opinion, there should be less orange in the dark theme. its just too much orange in the ambiance theme.
the radiance theme goes very well with the orange highlighting.
also, in my opinion there is redundancy in the indicator applet area. i have noticed, rhythmbox opens up an indicator applet plus, there is an integrated applet to the sound menu. both of them perform the same operations , then why two applets?? waste of space and system resources!
also,
the background transparency for the gnome panels with both the themes, ambiance and radiance, are not correct. they become half transparent. ie. the section with does not have applets are transparent the rest of the panel is opaque.
the transparency works fine with clearlooks, dust and dust sand themes.
I also think that rounded edges on taskbar items is a better idea.
What was wrong with the window buttons on Lucid? If it’s not broken, don’t fix it…
I still like Ambiance much more than Radiance, but Radiance is been improved..
I found the fonts and stuff on the top panel hard to read. They’d probably have to use a different colour don’t you think? Is it necessary to be beige? They’d make some displays look dirty ha!
Good job… I really think Ambiance is been getting much better on Maverick and I did like the orange on the menus over the beige on lucid, as well as the light grey on the windows.
PS. I don’t know if is just me, but I don’t think Orange-Purple match with Brownish.
Are window borders larger than 1px now? This was the main usability issue with Radiance/Ambiance in Lucid: you had to accurately hit a 1px edge in order resize a window with your mouse/touchpad. Extremely frustrating.
I’ve modified Radiance by hand to increase borders to 5px, which works much better.
1. The scrollbars are too small.
2. I hate the unnecessary visual clutter of the button trough. It forces me to use my own customization of Lucid Radiance for my theme just to remove it.
3. I would prefer that all orange backgrounds had white foregrounds, for consistency and readability’s sake.
4. Please provide a good wallpaper: one that looks good and is rendered at high quality. The one for Lucid was OK, but looked like it was compressed a little too much.
5. I much prefer the thinner progress bars.
6. I’d prefer if there wasn’t a separator between the title bar and menu bar.
I think the window borders are too small, it’ really difficult to adjust the window size that way, and in evince there is no resize handle at the bottom right of the window.
Also, the title bar color of chromium is light orange now (it was the correct color in older versions of the theme).
The theme by it self is a totally different theme i think from Lucid. The old theme had it’s beauties and this one has too. I loved the colors and the window buttons on the old theme more but as i said, i believe it is a completly different theme, beautiful as well. Dunno if the scrollbars will be any problem for touchscreens in the future but they look perfect for desktops. The squared corners look more professional. Excellent work!
Synaptic in “Mark packages for task” (the option to install LAMP or the netbook interface…) looks horrible!!
The title has a dark gray background but the big problem is the list, is light gray with white background.
I don’t really like the rounded progress bar. I would make them squared.
I also don’t like the squared corners of windows’s
I too am affected with the slow menuitem.
just to one thing, don’t know if you would solve it or mozilla must do it, the light themes are well rendered with firefox, goes well with chromium, midori, epiphany… I love the improved themes, look good. thanks for your job
“Unfortunately, with the current technologies, shadows are drawn separately by the compositing manager, which draws a squared shadow around menus. The application (in our case the Gtk+ engine) has no way to tell the compositing manager to draw a particular shape. Furthermore, when the compositing manager detects a RGBA window, it does not draw any shadow at all.”
Cimi, maybe I’m misunderstanding you as I’m not a programmer, but I’ve been playing around a LOT with RGBA transparency with Compiz and have it working pretty flawlessly on both Gnome and Xfce (it works better on Xfce thanks to xfce4-panel, but with some tweaking you can have it working seamlessly in Gnome too). Which shadows can’t be drawn and why?
Lucid screenshot…
http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/6754/screenshotxro.png
If i put a background to a panel, i doesn’t fit well.
If i increase a panel’s size, the result isn’t really good.
Anyway, great Job, i like the themes, i won’t need to change the theme in Maverick, thanks!
Me too I find menuitems really slow using radiance in my eee.
As a workaround, I edited my gtkrc file for the theme and changed “menustyle=2″ to “menustyle=0″ there.
I’m not sure why, but I see no noticeable cosmetic changes and the menu items are back to being lightning fast!
WOW.
Go Rola! That sure does speed up the menus. I didn’t know how niggling that situation was until it was gone. Thanks!
Various comments:
1) STOP TALKING ABOUT THE WALLPAPER. I’m just a reader, and even *I’m* upset about it. Cimi, future posts should be done on a plain black background just to keep people on topic. ;-)
2) Menu slowness sucks, but there’s both a workaround and a fix planned (Yay Cimi!)
3) _Kind of liked_ the fully-round progress bars better, but am not married to that. While we’re at it, I *miss my animated stripes* on progress bars. Not sure when that became passe, but I loved it so. :-(
4) Several things in this theme (and, frankly, *MANY* GNOME themes) are *way too small*. I’m on a 1600×1200 15″ screen: window borders are almost un-grabbable using a wired mouse; forget it using the touchpad. Ditto for the resize widget, and the window control buttons. I’m sure this is fantastically-sized for netbooks, but for anyone who isn’t on one of those, it is problematic to actually use these controls because of how hard it is to zero on to them and click or drag.
5) Most everything else, IMO, is much improved, particularly the color scheme and *buttons*. Those dark, brown buttons from last rev just struck me as horrible – this is all much, much better. Ditto for the scrollbar color and a whole bunch of tiny details that I didn’t realize were so important.
That’s all the feedback off the top of my head.
Also, something that has nothing to do with the theme, but still looks bad: Spacing between icons is different on the Indicator Applet vs. the System Tray. That’s just annoying, and with this theme it is slightly worse because I really can’t see the SysTray’s handle image at all unless I get right up on the screen. The overall effect is that some icons are spaced *very* far apart, and others are not, for no good reason.
Hm, looking at that Radiance screen shot only one thing pokes my eye, so to speak. Title font color on active windows could be a bit darker. Take a look at menus (which have the same background tone) and then compare it to window title. More contrast would be welcome.
As for the scroll bars, I prefer them the way they are now. They represent, for me at least, indicators of content scroll location. In my opinion most users use either mouse scroll or keyboard. Event notebook and netbook users can scroll using edge of their touch pads. If there’s a need for wider scroll bars either clone this theme or make them few pixels wider. Other that that, it would ruin the overall feeling of slickness.
Progress bars are an absolute beauty. They are one of the reasons I can’t wait for update. No need to thick, space wasting progress indicators. These are precise, slick and good looking.
I’ve also noticed sluggish menu items. Real deal-breaker for testing.
Menuitem speedup is up, hope to see new themes and engines in maverick soon
>Scrollbars: are they really too tiny? what is your experience?
yes, yes and YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!
Ive been online this week trying to figure out how to change the scroll bars in Kubuntu.
All teh seniors that ive installed Linux for have two big problems that deal with visibility.
the system icons are too small no matter how big the panel is made adn they cant use the scroll bars which are two thin.
the arrows at top or bottom are totally useless.
When you have weak eyesight, you need things bigger.
I can make it all bigger, icons, fonts, etc…
but those two things are huge problems
@Andrea: Is it packaged already?… I love the new theme, I’ve switched it in Lucid since the old Radiance for lucid took too much space on screen. Anyway I had to rewrite the old folders with the maverick source version since the lucid packaged version was 0.1.6 and it had conflicts with the naming thing. This worked just fine but I also noticed the slow menuitem stuff so I’m looking forward to update. Thanks!
The new themes are too obstrusive. Luckily the clearlooks one is still there in Appeareance and I can also set a blue background for the desktop. It’s much better than any reddish color (brown to purple) if you have to spend all the day working on your pc. See any industrial psychology text about colors. This is the first link I googled up http://www.precisionintermedia.com/color.html
The top window borders look too Windows XPish for my liking. Please flatten the gradient a little and make it less rounded looking. Radiance is the finest Ubuntu theme btw.
I know I’m late to the game … but I hope someone still reads this.
The theme looks really great!
One little thing i find really annoying: The space between the scrollbar and the element the scrollbar controls. I find that hugely distracting, that this space exists. I certainly prefer a “more coupled” style, so I can actually know which element belongs to the scrollbar.
Somehow this is fixed in some themes, but it still comes up from time to time and I have to hack the gtkrc myself.
If there are concerns about the look when the scrollbar directly touches the thing it controlls, i would suggest only rounding the steppers on the side _not_ touching the other element.
I made a quick hack in GIMP to show what I would really prefer: imgur.com/ZqYJJ
Hi,
I think the scroll bars are too thin. It’s really causing some problems in Open Office.
By reducing the height of the horizontal scrollbar, this also reduces the height of the tabs in Open Office Calc (the spreadsheet program). This means that the scaled down tabs are difficult to read, and if you have multiple tabs on the one workbook, the selection button to scroll through the tabs are reduced so much that they are difficult to click on.
I like the rest of the theme though ;)
The scrollbars are really tiny, please make them like before!
Great job, all these improvements have made Ambiance and Radiance the best gtk themes ever!
What I just don’t like is the red of preselected buttons. The orange glove used in highlighted buttons is better.
And I don’t know why some buttons are grey (sad) and others white (happy), even if often they have the same function.
It would be great to see in Maverik updates applications like Totem following dark themes.
Absolutely waiting for the RGBA transparency in the Natty Narwal.
Keep going docs!
Niceeeee Thanks…
Help! My ambiance window control panel has gone stupid. Please see http://db.tt/wCytvIY
This is a freshly reinstalled system. I can see, the window control panel on an inactive window, but I can’t touch or use it. When I switch to a different window, the controls vanish. This is depicted in the terminal image. BUT! This occurs only on my daily use account which I’ve configured. My admin account is left at the default Radiance settings and doesn’t act up at all. Attempted to set this account to complete defaults, but it still acts up.
Hi,
Just curious, look at the close, minimize, and maximize buttons of window, and compare with the dark theme, the icons are single line and looks weak while header and border are stonger, and make me a little worried whether they will be broken…:)
I’m not ui expert, but a user.
Dop