Currently the chatter surrounding Ubuntu is obviously focused on its next upcoming release 10.04 Lucid Lynx. However, most blog posts and news articles are all talking about the new artwork rather than any technological advances. Discussion (as ever with Ubuntu users and critics alike) seems to focus almost solely on colour. Yes that’s right. I said colour. This release will bring about quite a few changes in not only the colour scheme of the default desktop, it’s wallpaper and themes but also the ubuntu website, online shop, documentation cd covers (just mockups currently) and more besides. Which is nice. But how important is it?

The key word that so many people seem to miss here is default. It’s what the desktop arrives on your computer looking like after a fresh install or while trying out the livecd. I would happily agree that first impressions do mean a lot. Having a slick polished-looking desktop is seldom a bad thing. However, it really is the easiest thing to change whether you’ve never used Ubuntu or Linux before or you are a hoary old hedgehog like me.

What gets my goat is the extent to which the debate surrounding this tiny aspect of the OS takes such focus. The default theme released with Ubuntu has become more polished with each release but it never looked bad. As much as so many bemoan the brown, it made Ubuntu as successful as it has been. No other popular distro used quite such a distinctive and memorable scheme – most default to blues or greens and look entirely unexceptional. The proposed new colours, aubergine being amongst them (fantastic colour, shame about the taste) will hopefully still remain fairly unique to Ubuntu but time will tell.

If I were to point you in the direction of omgubuntu.co.uk and their recent post about the new wallpaper (thanks for the link mesanna!) you need only scroll down the page a few hundred lines to see all the same old arguements coming out about OS aesthetics (obviously being linked to anything even remotely OSX related as often as possible – grr macs..) Why is it impossible to create a nice looking system without being accused of stealing elements of its design from commercial alternatives? Sometimes there genuinely are only a few ways of accomplishing a particular UI successfully and once the best way has been tried and tested enough it is adopted. This is not theft. This is common sense.

Anyway.. what I’m slowly getting round to saying is that yes, re-style your site’s look, give the documentation a face-lift even create more themes and wallpapers. But don’t expect to be able to create a set of themes and wallpapers that will capture the hearts and minds of everyone. It can’t be done.

In my opinion, rather than spending all this time on the look of the thing just make is as obvious as is humanly possible that you can change how everything looks. Perhaps a notification bubble at boot with the words “You can change how I look! Click here to choose a style and find out more”. Shouldn’t be hard right? I’m thinking of adding a filter in firefox for the words “ubuntu + brown + ugly” I’m that tired of reading about this. Proof can be found again by looking at the post linked above and skimming through the comments. I will leave you with one comment which made me laugh, not because it’s right or bold or clever but because it is so fantastically idiotic.

are you serious? What the hell is wrong with ubuntu. I mean, I had a little sympathy for the whole brown thing, but honestly, you should have known everyone hates brown. Ask any girl with brown eyes and they go “eww! they look like poop!”

So, to further expand on your theory, do girls with blue eyes hate Fedora? Green eyes can’t stand openSUSE? Is this something limited only to the female of the species? Thank you Zach for sharing and bringing a smile back to my face!

In addition, my apologies for the lack of posts lately. Amongst other things I’ve really not been well, a recent bout with kidney stones has laid me low but I feel it’s time now to get back on top… so to speak. I have new toys too (laptop and phone), time I did something with them! Soon as I get Ubuntu set up of course. It spent last night defragging that pesky NTFS partition so today I can resize and free some hard drive space. I’m biting my nails when it comes to graphics support (I’ve always used nvidia in the past, this laptop has a Radeon 3450) but I’m sure it will handle things immaculately.

One thing this HP Laptop has impressed me with so far (I only got it yesterday) is being able to run Bloodbowl at it’s native resolution of 1440 x 900. But not just run – run smoothly with some effects and filters turned on – I’m very impressed! Note to anybody reading this who has a copy of the game – get in touch. I’d love to test the online multiplayer on this game.

That’s all for now, you should see this site return to it’s former state over the next few days. In the mean time I apologise for missing links – sorry!

EDIT

Ok, so I’ve finished moving bendavis.me to my new domain manager and host so the site is back! All I need to do is change the theme. It’s not autumn any more… time for a new look. Expect my style’s to be in flux for a while as I jangle about in the back (metaphorically) trying to plug the Christmas lights in.

Looking through the Divine Project website and reading more about it seems to uncover a few pertinant points.

The site itself answers my initial question in its F.A.Q

What is Divine plug-in?

Divine is the program developed for those who know a bit about Photoshop and sites creation but don’t want to waste their time making up a valid website on basis of popular CMS manually. Using this program you are able to easily make up a professional website and upload it promptly to the server through the embedded FTP-client.

Waste time making a valid website? Are they insinuating that valid code is unimportant? Can’t say I agree with that if that is what they mean. The plugin goes so far as to manage the entire themes’ upload and management as well.

I can see this being a very tempting short-cut for a lot of wordpress users.. but not the die-hards. Although in essence the first release of it is beta I still see its shortcomings as pretty important. A full list of the current limitations of the plugin are listed here so I’ll just talk about a few of the most important ones to me.

1. Firstly there is a default layout which currently (they do plan to expand from it) you have to adhere to. Not a huge problem, most WordPress websites are arranged in a similar way. Header, content, sidebar and footer; but not all and I still believe this would curtail creativity.

2. Custom CSS (in the documentation they refer to these as useritems) is limited to a total of 5 entries. Everything else must be accomplished using only existing wordpress generated css. I think of this as being quite similar to the idea behind csszengarden.com. While that works for zengarden I don’t believe it could work for wordpress themes where more often than not a truly stand out theme will feature some clever creations of the developer.

3. This I think is huge. All images created by the plugin are gif format. That to me strikes out any hope of gaining my custom even if I had a copy of Photoshop. Are they mad? Jpg and (for me preferably) png images are where internet design can only be taken with SVG poking it’s resizeable head around the corner. Gif is a format which, for me, is defunct for all but the simplest of web designs. The formats’ only bonus is the fact you can create animations; as brilliantly used in the Retro Theatre design by Eric Rogé.

All in all I like the fact that this plugin has been made, despite my criticisms of it. Not everyone is confident with code and not everyone wants to be. This plugin gives people like that a chance to indulge their creativity and get it online. My worry is that it will be responsible for a deluge of new themes, none of which use valid code. In addition to which the creator would not necessarily have a clue how to deal with problems which might arise. How for example would designs created by this plugin deal with different browsers? The rendering properties of IE, firefox, opera, konqueror etc are problems which still plague developers to this day – has this plugin solved them all? I somehow think not.

Never-the-less I will follow this plugins progress and see what users of it have to say – one of whom is my brother so I shall be getting his feedback too – it may even appear on his site!

But this is all just one man’s opinion – I’d love to know what my other fellow wordpress users think about it?

If you like the background, expect to see more of it when release it as a wallpaper. I’ll be doing some colour variations and possibly some Linux badges may find there way on somewhere.

My big question now though, is do I make the main content black to match the rest of the page or leave it as white to stand out and ensure it’s easily readable?

Love to hear your comments.