August 26th, 2010 byHi 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
- 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!
The toolkit
112 Responseshide comments
@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?
I live near Venice! So “go Murrine go!”! 
It’s great to know that someone living near me (or have you moved away?) is so active in developing my favorite OS!
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!
)
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.