polly-open-team team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, so here is the delayed longer email on this.

As interesting as a community of "make your own Polly design"
might sound, I'm not terribly excited by the idea. I think we
should always strive for consistency and integration rather
than customization. We should always keep in mind that Polly
is not supposed to make everyone happy.

Allowing custom sheets should be something the user does
for usability, not aesthetics. Like preferring dark themes for
a movie player, for example. Customizing for the sake of
customizing might be made possible, but should never be
a priority.

There is also the fact that GTK3 is CSS-inspired, not CSS-based.
A GTK app will *never* be as flexible as a WebKit app. Pretending
otherwise will just make web designers start excited and end
completely frustrated.

That said, there are valid reasons for changing themes, such as
readability. So 0.94 will allow custom sheets to be loaded on
startup. However, I don't really expect a "theme community"
to grow around this. Sure, it will be fun and interesting if it
happens, but that shouldn't be really the point.

So my position on this is: the user should be allowed to load a
non-system GTK theme into Polly if he wishes, but not much
more than that. I will also allow loading a custom palette for
the color selector, so it can be packaged together.

I personally think allowing much more than that is a bad idea.
It makes no sense, for example, to allow gradients on mentions
and recent posts. Since many posts can be on that state, using
gradients can make the stream look all bulby and ondulated.
No, gradients should be restricted to selected items (the
ones being replied), as those are restricted to one per stream
(it is no coincidence that virtually all GTK themes only set
gradients on the selected items of a list)

So the user will be allowed to customize GTK theme and the
color selector palette. I think this is more than enough.

Thoughts?