Epidermis

Epidermis is dead

Flimm — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:21:54 +0000

I have a long overdue announcement to make: I will no longer be developing or maintaining Epidermis for the foreseeable future.

Since I'm the only developer of Epidermis, this means that Epidermis is dead. Do not be expecting updates or fixes or new skins from now on.

I really want to thank everyone who contributed, especially the tireless translators. Cheers!

So why am I quitting?

The reality is, I should have announced Epidermis' death at least a year ago. The project lost had lost momentum, and it is not fair on users to give the false impression that the project is maintained and actively developed. It is not. For the most part, Epidermis was already dead, I'm just making it official.

I stopped regularly developing Epidermis ever since I started drafting "Universal Themes" or "Cooperating Themes". I had hoped I would receive a lot more feedback on freedesktop.org's mailing lists, and without consensus I wasn't daring enough to just take decisions and not wait until the perfect standard had been created. I let perfect become the enemy of good enough.

Epidermis became a stale project. It's buggy on newer versions of Ubuntu and Debian unstable, it hasn't kept up-to-date with GNOME Shell or Unity, and the number of themes available in the repository has not increased at all. I'm not proud of it, and I feel I should only be releasing code to the world that I am truly proud of.

Another reason I'm euthanizing Epidermis is that I didn't receive any code contributions. Developing code got lonely, and I often wondered if I should be spending time contributing to active projects instead. I did get lots and lots of translations though, thank you awesome contributers on Launchpad! Unfortunately, translations alone do not make a quality open source product.

Another demotivating factor was that I had trouble getting Epidermis into the Debian repositories, and into the Ubuntu repositories. This is some time ago, but my requests for sponsorship just got ignored. This is not very motivating at all. I'm very happy to see the more recent efforts of people like Asheesh to make Debian and other open source projects more welcoming to new contributors.

When I started my university degree, I became a lot busier than I expected. Since my degree is in computer science, my hobby became my degree, and I tried and adopted new hobbies in my spare time. In the end, this just meant less time for Epidermis, making Epidermis more and more out-of-date.

I may start working on Epidermis again in the future. If I do so, I will work on it in private (or at least, on Launchpad, but without announcing anything), releasing the final result once I am satisfied with it. "Release early, release often" did not work for me, as I failed to attract other contributors.

I hope to see you all again soon, in a community of a more exciting project perhaps. Cheers!

0.6 released

Flimm — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:32:08 +0000

Three new languages have been added to Epidermis 0.6: French, Australian English and Canadian English. The backend for preview generation has been greatly improved, the previews for GTK, Metacity, Icon themes and skins are now identical to the ones generated by GNOME Control Center. It will prove useful for the Epidermis 1.0.
Download the new release

Changelog:

Added new languages: French, Australian English and Canadian English.
Relicensed to GPL version 2 only.
Metacity, GTK and skin previews are now generated silently without displaying an annoying window for a second.

Future directions

Flimm — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:12:45 +0000

For a long time now, Epidermis has had a fundamental weakness: there just aren't enough themes in its repository.

Currently, theme authors submit themes by creating the pigment files themselves and sending them to me by email. I then manually add the themes to the repository hosted on tuxfamily.org. Obviously, this approach is not scalable at all. Having to ask for my permission and assistance to upload new themes is a psychological barrier to contribution, but most of all, it places much too great a burden of work on me.

I could develop a website that competes with the likes of gnome-look.org, allowing theme creators to independently upload their creations to the repository. But I don't want to compete with OpenDesktop.org, I want to complement it. And for this happen, the theme format must catch on.

So here's the plan: I'm going to concentrate all my development plans on implementing the new cooperating theme format. I'm also going to develop a converter for existing .tar.gz themes. Then I'm going to try and advertise it like crazy, to get theme creators on board. Because I can only support so many things at once, Epidermis 1.0 won't have the automatic repository feature at all. Remember, the goal of Epidermis is to be obsolete, as desktop environments and applications start to implement the innovation themselves.

Universal/Cooperating themes is duplicate effort

Flimm — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:10:07 +0000

Imagine my surprise and frustration to find out this morning that my efforts to design a "universal theme" were redundant, as a similar idea has already been discussed and specified.

Here are the mailing list discussions dating all the way back to 2007. (Argh!)

You can see the current Theme Package Spec here.

Meanwhile, I have been studying RDF/XML, Dublin Core and OpenDocument extensively to design Cooperating Themes (renamed from Universal Themes). I have published my work in this bazaar branch (see the files).

Comparing the two theme package formats was fascinating. I've prepared a table summarising the differences so far:

	ThemePackage	Cotheme	Comments by Flimm, author of Cotheme
File extension	.theme	.cotheme	.theme is already used by Windows themes, as well as other file formats. .cotheme has not been used, as far as I am aware.
Mime-type	application/x-themepackage	application/x-cotheme	Both are unique, AFAIK
Archive format	gzipped-compressed tarball	zip	Gzipped tarballs are the traditional archive format for themes on free desktop environments. However, the zip file format is more universally accepted. In addition, zip files allow random access to its contents by file name, allowing rapid extraction of metadata files or thumbnail files. Different files can be compressed at different levels and at specified positions in the file. This is important for maintaining the magic number. OpenDocument packages use zip.
Magic number	None	application/x-cotheme found at byte x
Metadata file format	an INI file (similar to .desktop)	an RDF/XML file	While INI files are simpler to edit by hand, their format is not well documented, leading to incompatible parsers. XML files are also reasonably easy to edit by hand. The XML file format is very well defined, and parsers exist for practically every programming language. Developers and theme creators would not need to know RDF at all, similar to DOAP, the XML format chosen would coincide with RDF/XML.
Embedded thumbnails	None	Included (Thumbnails/thumbnail.png)	Cotheme's thumbnail mechanism is similar to OpenDocument's.
Include multiple themes	Yes	Yes
Theme types allowed	Not specified	Almost any that meet the minimum requirements
Theme type names	Simple but limited: gtk-2.0, xfwm4, etc	Uses URNs, unlimited
Required and recommended meta-data	name version name and email of the maintainer name of the artist description license	name version name of the creator description license source rights holder date copyrighted dominant colour relationships to other cothemes (dependence or inclusion) dependencies on pieces of software (can be expanded to include any RDF data, which is unlimited)	Cothemes use the well-established vocabulary of Dublin Core for some of its metadata. Dependencies on other themes can be specified (for example, icon themes on other icon themes). Dependencies on software programs or libraries can be specified (for example, GTK themes on GTK engines), in a way that would allow automatic installation of the dependency.
Can metadata be translated?	Unspecified, probably yes	Yes

I'll update the table here, if need be. I'll be emailing Stephan Arts, as he seems to be the driver behind Theme Package Format. It hasn't been adopted much so far, so it's still up for discussion in my opinion.

So what do I think of previous effort? I quite like it. It's very simple and not too different from current theme formats in free desktop environments. People are familiar with .desktop or .INI style. There's no XML to wrap your head around if you're not familiar with that. Just check your files in a .tar.gz with a single ThemePackage.index file and you're done.

On the other hand, it's missing some features I badly want: the main one being thumbnails. I also feel that Cothemes are much more future ready and universal: it uses RDF for metadata, it is easily expandable, it relies on solid XML and a universally accepted archive format. The dependency feature is nice as well, I feel.

If after any discussions I have with interested parties at XDG the consensus is not to go with Cothemes at all, I'll be disappointed, but I will swallow my pride. Theme Package Format is not bad. I've spent a lot of effort in designing Cothemes, but so have the designers of the Theme Package Format. I learnt a lot about RDF and OpenDocument on the way, so it hasn't been a total waste.

New Matrix theme

Flimm — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:23:01 +0000

Hello everybody!

PotcFdk has packaged an awesome new skin based on the Matrix theme. It includes a wallpaper, a metacity theme, a GTK theme and an icon theme. It's in the repo so download it now!

Summer break

Flimm — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:39:34 +0000

Hello everyone. I thought it would be fair to tell you that I'm planning on taking most of July off working on Epidermis. I'm planning to spend three weeks in August of intensive hacking, but we'll see.

Six new languages added in 0.5.2

Flimm — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:21:32 +0000

Six new languages have been added in Epidermis 0.5.2: German, Galician, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian. Download the new release

I'd like to thank all the translators who've helped on this project. They're awesome! The help I've received on this front has been phenomenal.

Here's a list of them all:

German (de):
  Cory Walker https://launchpad.net/~lala32
  MartinK https://launchpad.net/~goretekz
  Michael Konrad https://launchpad.net/~nephelyn
  Patrick Eigensatz https://launchpad.net/~p.eigensatz
  Philipp Muggli https://launchpad.net/~pmpmlpml
  xlazarus https://launchpad.net/~xlazarus
British English (en_GB):
  David D Lowe https://launchpad.net/~flimm
  Nick Trew https://launchpad.net/~vxnick
  SteVe Cook https://launchpad.net/~yorvyk
Spanish (es):
  David A Páez https://launchpad.net/~orlsend
  David D Lowe https://launchpad.net/~flimm
  DiegoJ https://launchpad.net/~diegojromerolopez
  Elvira Martinez https://launchpad.net/~tatica1
  Emiliano https://launchpad.net/~emilianohfernandez
  Feder Sáiz https://launchpad.net/~federsaiz
  Federico Vera https://launchpad.net/~fedevera
  Javier García Díaz https://launchpad.net/~jgd
  Jorge Dardón https://launchpad.net/~jdardon
  Masabakes https://launchpad.net/~rolslayer
  Paulis https://launchpad.net/~ioritzpaulis-89
  atorreaa https://launchpad.net/~aatorrealba+launchpad
  pico.dev https://launchpad.net/~pico.dev
  tamalet https://launchpad.net/~tamalet
Galician (gl):
Dario https://launchpad.net/~dario-villar-v
Manuel Angel Varela https://launchpad.net/~mvarela
Italian (it):
  Andrea Ravaglia https://launchpad.net/~ravaglia-andrea
  David A Páez https://launchpad.net/~orlsend
  Davide Notaristefano https://launchpad.net/~mokmo
  G.Mara https://launchpad.net/~giuseppe-mara
  Gianfranco https://launchpad.net/~gpd-iol
  Giuseppe https://launchpad.net/~giuseppe-montano66z
  Milo Casagrande https://launchpad.net/~milo
  Modernday https://launchpad.net/~gigamatthew
  iTuxer https://launchpad.net/~ituxer
  panoramix https://launchpad.net/~panoramix89
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR):
  Carlos André Ferrari https://launchpad.net/~caferrari
  Claudio Gontijo https://launchpad.net/~claudiogontijolinux
  João Paulo Pizani Flor https://launchpad.net/~joaopizani
  João Santana https://launchpad.net/~joaosantana
  Stephen Lemos https://launchpad.net/~marcustephen
  Teylo Laundos Aguiar https://launchpad.net/~teylo.aguiar
Portuguese (pt_PT):
  David A Páez https://launchpad.net/~orlsend
  Flame_Phoenix https://launchpad.net/~palmelapedro
  Luis Pratas https://launchpad.net/~luispratas
  Pedro Barreira https://launchpad.net/~almufadado
  Tiago https://launchpad.net/~tiagosilva
Russian (ru):
  METAdenisik https://launchpad.net/~acifra
  Sarg0s https://launchpad.net/~sum-teh
  Sergey Sedov https://launchpad.net/~serg-sedov
Ukranian (uk):
Sergiy Gavrylov https://launchpad.net/~gavro

Changelog:

Added new languages: German, Galician, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian.
Updated error handling to accept Apport 1.12.2
Added DOAP file (Description Of A Project)

Thumbnails for OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office documents

Flimm — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:51:30 +0000

Although not related to Epidermis in any way, I've recently released version 0.3.1 of ooo-thumbnailer. I thought you might be interested in it.

ooo-thumbnailer integrates automatic thumbnails in Nautilus for OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office documents, presentations, spreadsheets and templates, as you can see in the screenshot.

ooo-thumbnailer goes beyond what is provided by gsf-office-thumbnailer (Debian package name: libgsf-bin): it puts a convenient file type icon in the corner of the thumbnail, and it shows thumbnails for Microsoft Office files regardless of how it was saved. By default, both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org do not save preview information for Office files. ooo-thumbnailer can generate these previews on the fly, if necessary.

You can install ooo-thumbnailer for Ubuntu with this PPA. The package should be in the Debian unstable repositories as soon as I find a sponsor. Hopefully, it will get packaged for other Linux distributions as well.

Find more details about the project and the source code at launchpad.net/ooo-thumbnailer.

Universal themes: progress

Flimm — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:13:46 +0000

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.)
In it would be the XML file, the thumbnail and preview image files, and a compressed archive for the theme. This would allow theme creators to actually choose their own compression formats if they know that the system supports it. Example:
- my_gtk_theme.utheme (a zip file with 0 compression)
  - utheme.XML
  - thumbnail.png
  - preview.png
  - my_gtk_theme.tar.gz (a gzipped tarball, this format would be chosen by the theme creator)
It should be possible to specify which language is the original one for meta-data, so as to make translation of the meta-data as accurate as possible.
Theme types should use namespaces to uniquely identify them. This will hopefully prevent clashes between possible future theme types.

I'll be adding these ideas to the wiki page soon.

More bug fixes in 0.5.1

Flimm — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:30:32 +0000

Epidermis 0.5.1 has been released. This version has much better error handling. If pigments are corrupted on the system, Epidermis will allow you to remove them (fixes bug #538715). And when Epidermis crashes, a user-friendly error message will appear, guiding the user to reporting the bug with Apport.

Translations include Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and British English, thank you to all the contributors who translated.

Changelog:

New Apport hook for systems that support Apport.
Ported to Python 2.6
Better error handling.
New --installation-dir option for setup.py
Badly installed pigments are now easier to remove and handle (fixes bug #538715)