Clearlooks

A simple, elegant, and usable Gtk theme

View Full Size Screenshot

For a while now I've been developing Clearlooks inside of GNOME CVS, the module gtk-engines. This includes the GDK version as well as the new Cairo version that has been worked on.

For details on checking out the new Clearlooks from CVS, visit http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html.
The GDK version can be found with the tag "gtk-engines-2-6" and the Cairo version is in HEAD.

If you don't know what this means, then you should stick with the releases ;)

Clearlooks v0.6 got released today! A number new exciting changes have been made this time.

• New menuitem style.
• New button style.
• New listview item style.
• And much more!

Get it while it's hot!

Well I decided to pickup some Clearlooks development today. I was extremely suprised by the professional looks of OpenOffice.org 2.0 on Windows, so I decided to try it out in Linux as well. That was quite a shock...

The OpenOffice.org team don't seem to be trying very hard at making OpenOffice.org 2.0 look good with the GTK-wannabe UI. I was able to make some improvements, but it still looks very odd in places. Maybe one day someone will actually give a serious attempt at mimicking GTK+.

Some applications use the GtkProgressbar in ways it wasn't meant for. Such as displaying the amount of diskspace used on a CD-R, or audio volume. With animation support enabled for progressbars, this looks kinda wierd. I have been thinking of a way to allow developers to force the progressbar into being static. The first thing that came to my mind was to set the progressbar to 'Insensitive' (read: Disabled). I tried it on a bunch of themes, and the look of the progressbar doesn't change in any theme (nor in Clearlooks) so I think that this might be a good way to tell the engine to draw a static progressbar. It's not implemented in Clearlooks yet, but I will unless someone gives me a good reason not to do it.