Re: [libreoffice-design] [VI] Consistent theme for screenshots

Hi all,

I tried to browse all the mail that were sent during the last days ...
so sorry if I missed something, but I hope to add my thoughts.

Am Samstag, den 25.06.2011, 13:00 +0200 schrieb Astron:
> Hi Marc,
>
> > Actually, if we do adapt and name our theme, our goal, like any other
> > product in our "arsenal of products" would be to use it to our marketing
> > advantage. We could easily market it as a theme optimized for screenshots
> > and people would gladly download our "LibreOffice Theme" for this reason and
> > not necessarily for LibreOffice reasons.

Mmh, although this would be nice - we already miss people who work on
the product itself, so I think this is very optimistic :-)

> Clearly, maintaining an own theme is a lot of work. For instance, I
> don't know if Clearlooks has already been ported to Gnome 3.
> Another thing to note is that
> a) Mac theming is not customisable at all today and
> b) Windows theming is far less flexible than in the 2000 era (well,
> the legacy theming engine from Windows 2000 and earlier is still
> present, but it simply doesn't look temporary any more). It also isn't
> easy to install a third-party modern theme engine like Clearlooks in
> XP or later, additionally the free ones I've seen were all not very
> high-quality ones (I think they also have to be signed in Vista and 7,
> but I'm not sure). In Vista's and 7's Aero mode one can only choose a
> hue for the window frame.
> c) Gnome 3 theming is currently also not customisable via GUI, even
> though it has a very flexible CSS theming engine now.

This is a very good summary which leads (from my point-of-view) to the
basic questions, how crucial it is to provide screenshots differently
themed ... at the end, you may ask whether Gnome Linux, SuSE Linux, or
Fedora is the reference for the *nix screenshots.

Thus, I think it would be beneficial to:
      * chose a decent and rather vendor neutral theme like Clearlooks
        (controls and window decoration) [by the way, I often used it
        for my own OOo/LibO presentations - its nicely designed so that
        it doesn't distract people when looking at the LibO UI]
      * try to avoid showing the window decorations (the most
        distinctive element, usually) --> focus on the main window of
        LibO
      * adapt the design of the theme to match the LibreOffice branding

Concerning the latter, the advantage is that our branding is a bit
different from all the mentioned operating system designs - so no one
will be hurt when using it ;-)

[...]

> Here's an idea of mine: a public screenshot machine where after a
> login people can easily make screenshots within their browser windows.
> However, it would be difficult to make screenshots that require
> devices or OSs not installed on the machine. Additionally you'd need
> to make sure that people can upload example files etc. before they
> start the session and can download their screenshots afterwards.
> (Please note, I am just throwing this out here and have no idea how
> hard this would be to implement!).

Hehe, look at the time needed to setup and maintain the different buld
machines - a lot of time, I assume. But even today, its solvable...
      * Pick a common Linux distribution (that runs from an USB stick,
        at LiveCD, within a virtual machine)
      * Adapt the tweaks to the theme (if its something simple like one
        font or less than five colors)
      * Install the required build (e.g. beta release, RC release)
        within the Linux distribution

It is not the "one click" solution, but it should be "do-able" - the
hurdles are rather low, I think.


Cheers,
Christoph


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