While we do not normally report on themes, this one is special. Remember a few months ago our article on a “random Gnome2-Limbo screenshot”? OSNews reader Jan Rosczak dived into coding and the result is the LightHouseBlue theme for GTK+ 1.x and 2.x, based on some of the suggestions found on that article. While there is still some work to be done (e.g. change some of my button/tab colors to not be so… loud 🙂 the theme has already been accepted by users positively.
GTK+ Users, Meet the LightHouseBlue Theme
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
This certainly looks better than BlueCurve, hope in RH8.1 they would adopt this. However…. I wish there was a QT theme for this….
No Z-Snake on the menus! 😀
Maybe you should sugest some ideas to Porsche, and that you found previous models slow. Then wait for the UPS guy.
In most cases I prefer Bluecurve. The only thing I really like about Lighthouseblue is the darker color for buttons and tabs (just not _that_ color please
). And maybe rounded borders for buttons and tabs (like the slider knob). But only maybe. I also like the “sharpness” of the edgy Bluecurve buttons (they seem pretty smooth to me).
I certainly don’t like the “one pixel off” for everything, it looks especially cheap (IMHO) with the scrollbar, column headers and similar. If at all, it should not be used when two elements touch each other (like scrollbarbutton<->scrollbarhandle).
I also like the highlighted menu items of Bluecurve a lot better (the blue gradient).
>This certainly looks better than BlueCurve
It is actually based on BlueCurve, but extended and modified…
>No Z-Snake on the menus
This is a GTK+ issue, you need to first add the functionality to GTK+. For those who don’t know what ZSnake is, have a look here:
http://www.osnews.com/img/632/zsnake.png
Unfortunately, none of the screenshots available show the menus, which are all curvy with no “sharp” edges (yes, one pixel off 🙂
>And maybe rounded borders for buttons and tabs (like the slider knob).
LightHouseBlue has already these rounded, while BlueCruve doesn’t.
What needs to be done yet is fix the transparency issues some of the menus have, change the tab/button colors to something more “pal” in regards to the application body color (easy to do via the .gtkrc file) and to change the toolbar widget on the left side of each movable toolbar to another design…
> The only thing I really like about Lighthouseblue is the darker color for buttons and tabs (just not _that_ color please
)
I agree, I need to fix these colors to something more “blending” to the application’s body color (I submitted them to Jan in a hurry a few weeks ago).
Combo boxes look like command buttons with up/down arrow keys on them – I HATE that!! Even the ‘Redmond’ themes that I have seen for GTK have this look as well.
What is the fascination with trying to confuse the user by making buttons and combo boxes look alike?
Buttons etc look a lot like BeOS…and thats a good thing
hmm…. can you say Gonx. I like it! BeOS users know what im talking about.
Eugenia: It is actually based on BlueCurve, but extended and modified…
That’s means the claim that BlueCurve isn’t Free Software is false? One more thing to add to my “FUD against Red Hat Linux 8.0” list.
Eugenia,
Its your turn to take the the “review heat” now
.
Honestly, this theme is not pretty at all. It looks dull and square, and might as well have been taken from a 1994 UI. You can hardly compare it to XP, or to the regular Redhat BlueCurve. I certainly don’t think it will appeal to our famous Joe User. But since it is still a work in progress, I will reserver further judgement until you have had time to refine things.
> It looks dull and square, and might as well have been taken from a 1994 UI.
It is actually based on BlueCurve, and it is NOT square, unline Bluecurve that is in most places.
Also, to make a pretty UI, changing JUST the theme IS NOT ENOUGH. You have to make changes to the toolkit itself, and you need to make sure that application developers haven’t created monstrosities.
Check the original article to see how I designed it.
This theme is not ready yet, but even when it will be ready, it can’t be as nice as in the mockups, until someone changes the toolkit to do some things required be there by default in the apps.
Eg. GTK+ has trouble with transparent widgets. Jan can explain more on this.
Also, it is not possible to have bold header on tabs/boxes without such code being in the toolkit.
“LightHouseBlue has already these rounded, while BlueCruve doesn’t.”
Yes, that’s what I meant. If think that most of the “roundings” don’t look good, but for buttons and tabs it could be nice (though I probably would still prefer the squares of Bluecurve).
“Still has one fatal flaw … By Darius (IP: —.dsl.austtx.swbell.net) – Posted on 2002-10-12 03:10:27 Combo boxes look like command buttons with up/down arrow keys on them – I HATE that!! Even the ‘Redmond’ themes that I have seen for GTK have this look as well.
What is the fascination with trying to confuse the user by making buttons and combo boxes look alike?”
Uhm, how else should it look like? This is by design and you can clearly differenciate them from buttons. They are things to click at, so they look like things to click at. How else? I don’t know any toolkit who does this differently, unless maybe the un-editable Windows comboboxes which are in the UI hall of shame because of this…
BTW, those aren’t actually “combo boxes” as combo implies that it’s a combination of beeing able to entering text and the dropdownlist. An example for this would be the Galeon locationbar. The problem is that Windows does not know an element like “options menu” (like it’s called in GNOME HIG), so an “options menu” in Windows is simply done by using a combo box and making the text entry widget uneditable which is complete crack. I don’t know how later versions of Windows like XP handle this though. However, I see nothing wrong with how Gtk renders them.
“That’s means the claim that BlueCurve isn’t Free Software is false? One more thing to add to my “FUD against Red Hat Linux 8.0″ list.”
Yes, absolutely. It’s just the name that is trademarked so you would have to change this (and some Red Hat logos).
I just read that RH is planning to default the name to “Wonderland” in the CVS version anyway, so it’s even easier to create “non trademarked” versions of it.
Bluecurve is very nice, but there are some things I dislike. Thankfully, Jan has addressed most of these issues in LightHouseBlue. My main complaint about Bluecurve is that the colours are too bright, and there isn’t enough contrast in the theme. LightHouseBlue has taken a step in the right direction by replacing all that grey with something more pleasant.
One thing that still needs to be changed, IMHO, is the high-intensity white background for the text. It looks okay in the screenshots, but only because it isn’t large. Imagine an app that shows lots of text (e.g. a mail client like Sylpheed) maximised to take up the whole screen. All that white in the background can be very painful on the eyes (even though I do not have vision problems). I would love it if Jan could change this to a slightly duller off-white.
Another thing I’m wondering is why Jan changed the looks of the arrows (e.g. for the scrollbars) in LightHouseBlue. The Bluecurve arrows look much more stylish and original.
With all the respect to the author, but this theme doesn’t seem to work. What am I doing wrong?
I log in with a normal user accout,
Start the X server
Launch the terminal, untar the file,
./configure
make
(no errors so far)
then I switch user to root “su root” and
make install
I have to switch user to root otherwise I get denied access errors because it writes to /usr…
Having done all that, no errors but the theme doesn’t appear in the Themes dialog.
What do I do next?
I don’t care what anyone says. It’s a very purdy theme
well…. i installed it. But im back to BlueCurve.
I dont know what all the fuss is about. Pretty everage.
Rather..ugly average
I like it very very much. It makes gnome look much more mature and advanced sytem, go man make it he best one, Only think I don’t like is the colour (should more like bluecurve) and this bitchy arrows, I prefer bluecurve’s
Bravo
good to see your idea’s in action eugina I thought you had good points and can’t wait to test it out.
I’ve compiled the theme but I can’t select it in the theme selector (RH 8.0). Am I doing somthing wrong?
> Another thing I’m wondering is why Jan changed the looks of > the arrows (e.g. for the scrollbars) in LightHouseBlue. The > Bluecurve arrows look much more stylish and original.
Just because I was not really sure whether I like
them or not. 😉
Especially in menus they do not look very pleasant.
The whole arrow thing is not settled. I am open for any suggestions.
I did the ./configure, make, make install.. And it doesnt show up in the themes selector for RedHat 8.0. Am I doing somthing wrong, am I not doing enough? I think the best way to install a theme would be to select the *.tar.gz from the theme selector and have it do all the work. Extra steps are just confusing.
I sent some color changes to Jan last night, but again, they need more work..
This is great – I like the basic look very much and I’m sure the tweaking wil make it better yet! Way to go!!
It probably installed it in /usr/local instead of /usr
If RH is like Debian, it stores the other themes in /usr/share/themes
If that’s the case, you should do:
./configure –prefix=/usr
then make and make install.
Actually, on Red Hat 8 I got it installed by manually copying the .so files and the gtkrc file somewhere on /opt/gnome2/bin/gtk2.0/blah-blah (can’t remember where exactly, I just put it in a similar dir as the other themes seem to exist)
Quick question, how do I get this theme working. I’ve configured, make and make install and it doesn’t show up on my themes preferences. Can anyone help me to get this thing installed?
Thanks…
I think there is a physcological problem here. Either you like it but want to dislike it or you dislike it and want to like it.
Besides, whether you like it or not, as a normal human, you would know as soon as you set your eyes on the arrows/colours for the first time.
—-
A bit OT, but why is it that all GTK+ themes can’t be configured to a different colour? At least not from the dialogs?
I’m a linux nubie.. this took me longer than I care to admit to figure out, but here it is for those that care:
As always this is on my machine YMMV.
(running gentoo 1.4 gnome2 etc.)
the theme installs into:
/usr/local/share/themes
you need to move it to:
~/.themes
the engine install to:
/usr/local/lib/gtk-2.0/2.0.0/engines
you need to move it to:
/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.0.0/engines
(I just moved the whole folder)
the metacity theme installs to:
~/.metacity/themes/metacity
You need to move it to:
/usr/share/themes
and make a sub folder named “metacity-1”
copy the png and xml files into the sub folder
full path to png and xml should be:
/usr/share/themes/metacity/metacity-1/ your files here
to set the gtk theme you just use the gnome theme tool.
to set the metacity theme use this command:
gconftool-2 –type=string –set /apps/metacity/general/theme metacity
I got the metacity info from here:
http://linuxxchange.linuxinfo.dk/gnome2-tips.php
Have fun,
Jeremiah
Forgot to mention…
Now that I finally got it working
I really like this theme.
the window wigets (min, max, close) are a little too
blured (it shuold look soft, not blurry)
just noticed that the close button doesn’t get a highlight box like the other two. it turns red, but no border.
anyone else see that?
Other than that it’s great!
OS X eat your heart out!
(I’m not even going to dignify “luna” by comparing it
that got to be the most gaudy interface ever)
Jeremiah
After install lighthouseblueblue overwrites my font and does not respect font selector choice
(yeah I know its wierd but I like it – comment afer you use it – you wll be surprised)
Open the gtkrc file and take out the “Tahoma” line.
Jeremiah, thank you for your installation instructions.
The real problem here is that the configure script uses /usr/local as the default prefix for where to install things.
You are the first that noticed the Metacity part. It is the least finished part of the whole theme and actually not released. It should not be installed by make anyhow.
Jeremiah, you can get the highlight box around the close button by making this change in the xml:
<draw_ops name=”close_button_prelight”>
<!–<include name=”button_normal_bg”/>–>
change to:
<draw_ops name=”close_button_prelight”>
<include name=”button_normal_bg”/>
I also found that the SlickZilla 1.0 theme for mozilla goes really well with LighthouseBlue
Hmm.. I can’t get this to compile On FreeBSD. Is it meant to? All I get is an error on line 339 of Makefile – must include an operator. Booo.
This is a really excellent theme – not perfect yet but it’s getting there. The metacity theme is pretty good as well – even better with the box-on-mouse-over added to the X button.
It would be REALLY great if this could be ported to qt as
well. I dont use KDE but it’s nice to have kde apps
fit in with my gnome desktop.
Can’t wait to see the next version – keep up the good work.
You need to use GNU make (it’s in the ports collection). Type “gmake” instead of “make”.