Epidermis

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I'm getting pretty psyched about this project.

Thanks to you, I've had several further ideas:

• Use RDF to describe the meta-data of the theme, like Description Of A Project does for software projects. There are tons of advantages to RDF, namely, that RDF aware applications won't have to know the universal theme format to use its meta-data. I bought a book on RDF to study it thoroughly for this project.
• Universal themes should have both a thumbnail and a preview image embedded in them. For example, icon sets could show just one icon as a thumbnail, and display several in their preview image.
• We choose the container format for its speed of extraction for single files. This is to allow thumbnailers and file indexers to grab thumbnails and meta-data about uthemes as quickly as possible. Currently, I'm thinking about using zip with 0 compression as the container format. (Zip is better than tar in this instance because it allows random access to files.)
  

I've just submitted a proposal to Freedesktop's XDG mailing list called Universal Themes. The proposal is attached as a PDF.

The idea is a new file format called "universal theme" (or utheme, for short), to accommodate all types of themes for your computer. Currently, the situation on Linux is far from ideal: find a theme on gnome-look.org or kde-look.org or wherever, and you get a .tar.gz. If you're lucky, it's been packaged correctly and the Appearance dialog knows how to install it. If you're new to theming, you'll just double-click a compressed tarball and be greeted with a collection of confusing files.

This new file format aims to have the following features:

As I develop Epidermis, I keep thinking of more and more reasons to drop support for Usplash pigments (and grub as well). Here's a list of why:

• Not all distributions support it. In fact, only Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives support it, as far as I know. Dropping Usplash pigments would make Epidermis easier to port to other distros, such as Fedora.
• Usplash themes have to be rebuilt for every release of Ubuntu and for every architecture. This makes creating and distributing Usplash themes incredibly complicated. Pigments are supposed to be indepedendent of the type of machine used. Usplash themes are more like programs in C, so they should be distributed like programs.
• The next version of Ubuntu, 9.10 Karmic Koala, will not include Usplash (brainstorming here). So sooner or later, I'm going to have to drop support for it anyway.

So don't be surprised if the next version of Epidermis loses a feature!

I've been working on exciting things for Epidermis 0.3: much better integration with .pigment files. Look at this screenshot: all the .pigment files have been thumbnailed, whatever their type (metacity, gtk, etc).

Good things coming soon...
(for the impatient there's always the bazaar branch)

Seems like half of all the currently open bugs are marked as "Fix Committed", so it's about time I release those fixes! So I'm releasing Epidermis 0.2.3~beta1 to testers!
If you find any problems, just submit a bug report.
If you successfully go through the test case, post a comment here so I see how ready 0.2.3 is to be released. I'm particularly interested in users who have already installed a previous version of Epidermis.
Thank you.

Bluman
A Blue Gnome Theme for those sad days when you get the Blue's :D

Now in the repos! (Sorry we been too Fedora lately)

Enjoy.

Hello just to keep you informed on the traffic of Epidermis,This are a couple of fun facts:

This last 30 days we have so far:

1,927 visits,they came from the following OS:

dilimo (Anton Kerezo) and gajolo have sent in new pigments: the famous New Wave theme and a sleek new design called Shiki-Brave. Get them while they're hot from the oven!
New Pigments

I've just thought of two more ways people can help, and I've added them to the appropriate page.

By the way, people have been sending in pigments, expect to see some more soon! Some of you may have noticed a few on the repo already...

I've enabled gravatars on my site, so if you don't forget to include your email address when you leave a comment on this site, your Globally Recognised Avatar will be displayed next to your comment. Go to gravatar.com to check it out.