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[e4-dev] modernizing the workbench visual design and remaining a good platform citizen

Hi, everyone.
We had a brief discussion on the e4 call about this topic and thought it would be good to make sure everyone is aware of it.

We are currently working with a graphic designer to modernize the style of the Eclipse 4.0 workbench. That is, what is the default stylesheet for the Eclipse SDK running on e4?

One of the more interesting constraints, which we've always had in Eclipse, is balancing the desire for a custom/modern UI with respect for platform look and feel, and the user's platform theme. In Eclipse 3.x, we've done this by using native widgets in most places, and looking up system colors as a reference point when choosing colors.

For e4, we still walk this line. Sure, we will have the technology to completely reskin the workbench, and folks are free to do so. But for the default look, I believe we will still be balancing these concerns. We may take more leeway in applying gradients, changing tab shapes, using background images or shading, but all of this should be done while still blending with the platform theme choices.

CSS support presents a new wrinkle. It's not good enough to simply make the right color choices for the workbench. Sure, we can do the math internally and pick the right colors. But it would be ideal if we could provide developers with the ability to style their own applications in this platform respecting way, and include web components that could blend nicely. Since CSS is RGB-based for color attributes, we're looking at ways to specify a more HSV-style color for elements, where the hue could optionally be ignored and instead be derived from platform theme colors. Note we aren't just talking about background colors for images and gradients. We'd like to be able to specify widget colors in this way. How should this be specified in a stylesheet?

Surely someone has already given some thought to this problem. If you have ideas, please comment in this bug! [1]
A more general discussion of the visual design work can be found here. [2]
And watching this bug [3] will ensure you see mockups when there is something to show.

thanks,
susan

[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=296175
[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/CSS/Visual_Design
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=293481


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