The Albatross GTK+ theme

The Albatross GTK theme is designed upon the Alvaro theme, from James Schriver. Albatross is designed to be smooth: no rough borders, no contrasted edges, no violent contrasts, a soft blue colour.

Albatross is still under development, and bugs with specific applications should be reported. However, Albatross is meant to be fast, and thus the gtkrc will remain light, and free of any application-specific tweaks, for applications that don’t use GTK+ widgets properly or don’t theme their custom widgets in the most appropriate way. These tweaks may be available, in a commented form, to distributors, though.

We’re also looking for feedback on usability: are the texts readable, are the colour contrasts acceptable for you? Any comments are welcome on the overall aspect of the theme, too.

Albatross is also an Xfwm theme

Albatross currently uses a slightly modified version of Xfwm4.6’s default window decorations, made by Olivier Fourdan. Yet, we’re looking forward to having our own window decorations, eventhough they’re not designed yet. They’ll probably be smooth and round as the current Xfwm default, but we don’t know the final shapes and colours it’ll have.

Other components of Albatross

The xsplash theme

Albatross’ xsplash theme has been made by Mads Rosendahl Hansen and Pasi Lallinaho. It’s using Xubuntu 9.10’s wallpaper, with a circle of sparkles in the middle of the screen. A preview video of an early version of the theme is currently available, and a more generic version will be released with the theme when it hits 0.2.

Possible future components

• Usplash theme
• GDM theme (old and new GDM versions)
• Icon theme
• Xscreensaver theme (being worked on)