claws-icon themes project
after not having written (and to be honest: worked on) much lately due to illness and the christmas holidays i thought i'd give a quick sign of life.
something i've been working on during the last year is porting icon themes to my favorite mail-app, claws-mail. it's fast and lightweight, not as visually-unappealling as its alter ego sylpheed and features tons of plugins that do everything i want them to.
now, why would you port icon themes for an application and why doesn't this app feature gtk-icon theme integration?
i've had this discussion several times, even on #claws (freenode) and after a while i decided i generally agree with the arguments brought forward in favor of having a separate icon-theme. the main problem is that an application like claws uses a lot of icons that you don't find in most gtk-icon themes. maybe the golden middle path would be to use gtk-icons as far as possible and have fallbacks for the rest. but i assume that since this is not really an itch for the devs it's not really going to be considered (unless of course, someone is willing to submit a patch).
ok, since we've cleared this out i want to quickly (and chronologically) introduce three icon themes i made (by the way: a complete icon theme for claws usually contains around 150 icons; a draft of what's needed is found in the claws faq). the first two themes are already featured on the claws-mail themes site.
1. hash_303030 (inspired by ALLGREY by aMADme)
an icon theme i made with the aim of keeping things rather monochrome and iconic (meaning: no complex images). i haven't published any updates on this theme in a while, but i know it's far from perfect and has a few serious design flaws.
its panel-icon is designed for a dark panel whereas the rest of the icons rely on a bright gtk-theme. this is due to the fact that it's the setup i personally mostly use.
2. gnome-brave (ported from gnome-brave by Victor C.)
a theme i made for integration with the gnome-colors themes - well, mainly it integrates with the blue gnome-brave (which was used by default in Xubuntu by the time i created it). i would say it has less flaws than aforementioned theme, but in a way there was a lot less to do (and think about) than with hash_303030. with most important decisions i kept in line with my previous thoughts (mostly: how do you create the crazy-massive amount of different folder icons).
3. elementary (ported from elementary by Daniel Foré)
this theme is unfinished (as you can even see in this screenshot; it uses gnome-brave as fallback), that's also one reason why it's not yet on the claws-theme site. i decided to port the widely popular elementary theme (based on versions 2.2 and 2.3) for claws. even though there are a few things missing it's already quite usable and i hope i can finish it in the course of this month.
i also had a port of the popular Eikon-theme (which is a mix of several themes) in the works but its obscure licensing situation made me decide i won't publish it.
if you have feedback or thoughts on any of the themes i'd be happy to hear/read. also there are certain things i'm never too sure about (like how to deal with the "hrm" and "mark" flags as they don't exist in any icon theme i know of, apart from the standard claws-theme obviously; or gpg related icons), so i'm grateful for input in many fields.
other than that i hope that those of you who use claws might find one of the themes appealing (just a sidenote: i personally still stick to hash_303030, maybe for sentimental reasons, maybe i've just gotten too used to it to switch or maybe the simple, monochrome thing is just what i like).
icon library
i sometimes work on icons (or icon themes). i mostly modify them, i have to say i never created a fully-fledged theme (apart from certain applications that demand their own icon theme like gmusicbrowser or claws-mail)
well, actually that started quite a while ago with that, when i got into xubuntu (yes, i started with that; i rarely used kde or gnome since then) with badger.
i just didn't like the looks of some of the icons, icon themes were (and most still are) inconsistent etc etc. so i started digging into icon themes to find where the icons that annoyed me where at home. back then i could've used something like the icon library! (not to say that it's still handy, even though i now know where most icons are found 
)
well anyhoo, i just stumbled across this a second time now so i thought i'd make a post about it just in case i forget again. unfortunately there's not even a starter included (or a howto or anything) in the tarball, so you have to run it from the terminal with "python icon-library.py" (yes, i agree, simple enough).
here's a screenshot so that you know what you're dealing with. amongst the nice features of the programme are a search function, a column that tells you which icons are actually in the theme and which are inherited, an option to change background colors (icons really look different on bright and dark backgrounds) etc.
a screenshot of the main window of the "icon library"
enjoy it!
ps: btw, here's a link to the thread that got me hooked on this (again).
hello world!
the new xubuntu is here!
hello world.
as my first post i'd like to point to the new xubuntu release took place today. it's quite a release i have to say, a lot of underlying changes (ext4, grub2, kernel 2.6.31 etc) and visual polishing (i really dig xubuntu's dark default theme albatross) make it worth the upgrade.
go and get it people - and congratulations to the xubuntu-team for the fantastic job they did!
on a sidenote: i've been testing karmic since alpha 4 and it was quite stable even back then. so i'd assume that it's a very solid release (even though i only tested it on one kind of architecture).