light-themes

Days ago, the new refreshed light themes landed in Quantal Quetzal, introducing a fancy yet "precise" built-in design, featuring rounded search areas, new checkbuttons and radio buttons, visually enhanced buttons, etc, basically, adding an overall qualitative + to Ubuntu 12.10's Ambiance and Radiance.

Ubuntu 12.04's Radiance and Ambiance adopted a new visual approach (as compared to Ubuntu 11.10) in terms of menus, meaning the menus have now a white look if they are generated by a white source and black if they are generated by a dark source.

The user visible consequences are white right-click menus on both Ambiance and Radiance, visuals that are not "digested" by various users, who tend to use, in their daily workflow, GTK+ themes with one-color per menu (right-click menus), finding the viceversa inappropriate.

Usability-wise unfocused state is a new quality implemented into Ubuntu's light themes, Ambiance and Radiance, attribute that brings a modern behavior suitable for a fancy desktop.

Days ago, we presented the at-that-moment work-in-progress light themes featuring new changes, and, just now, Ambiance and Radiance have been updated and landed in Precise Pangolin with the new UI enhancements.

Nautilus sidebar has been "fixed" and gained new colors suitable for a better integration with other visual window component, thus:

New polish has just arrived in LightDM's Unity greeter, pushing forward the consistency across various Ubuntu components, as well as branding touches.

Unity greeter 0.2.4 has been released, bringing:

• the cog icon replaced with an Ubuntu logo icon, acting as a session "keeper"

GTK+2 Ambiance and Radiance feature properly-assigned shadows, but, by design, they are differently allocated, meaning, the menus' shadows are smaller than nautilus'.

The reason is that Ambiance and Radiance have in their configuration files different shadow-ing, but, fortunately, this is quite easy to adjust.

CompizCpnfig Settings Manager-->Window Decoration lets you adjust the shadow's radius (its size), opacity (the shadow strength), but Ambiance and Radiance can't be affected by this method.

In the last cycle, Natty cycle, we saw a mockup/proposed version of the light themes with a dark toolbar, that was to give an impression of consistency and "one piece".

This long-awaited updated has landed in Oneiric Ocelot just now (only for Ambiance, but Radiance will probably follow this "trend").

Days ago, Ubuntu 11.10 shifted from GTK+2's Ambiance and Radiance to GTK+3.
Although this process was mainly about porting the light themes, there are some minor extra "stuff" from an UI point-of-view:

• tolltips have prominent borders now

Ambiance and Radiance, Ubuntu's light themes, have been finally ported to GTK+3. The new updated version (0.1.8.15) has just landed in Oneiric and, surprise, not only Ambiance, but also Radiance has been ported to GTK+3.

First of all, this first release is mainly about porting this themes to GTK+3, so, no major changes now, but:

An update brought, weeks ago, border-less Ambiance&Radiance in Natty Narwhal, and, shortly after, the developers changed back to bordered Ambiance&Radiance.

Yes, but, why?
There were problem with Unity 2D (Unity 3D's less-3D brother) and border-less themes.

All was great in Unity 3D, and, the developers proposed a "trick" :the testers/users should continue to use bordered themes, and, when the devs can fix the Unity-2D-related bug, the border-less themes to be reintroduced.

At the moment, the problem still hasn't been fixed.