oneiric ocelot

Last week the light themes received the modal dialog's theming and, just now the actual Compiz Modal Dialog plugin has landed in Oneiric.

When you have a broken keyboard or you just want to type with your mouse, Onboard, Ubuntu's default virtual keyboard, is quite handy.

Onboard is lightweight and easy-to-use tool, but had the same outdated look in the last Ubuntu releases and a new version, 0.95.1, brings an awesome fancy modern theme-aware UI, which transforms Onboard into and enjoyable experience not only for the hands (the fast response when clicking) but also for the eyes (the carefully chosen colors are a delight to watch).

What is new in Onboard 0.95.1?

Right from the beginning, Oneiric's Ayatana Overlay Scrollbars gained an orange border and a slightly changed behavior.

The thumb has just been redesigned and Ubuntu 11.10 ALPHA 1 features now a less rounded almost rectangular thumb.

The Overlay Scrollbars 0.2.3 use now GTK+ colors (the overlay and the thumb will follow the GTK+ color) and support right to left locales, improved behavior/appearance on small scrolled windows (the thumb becomes smaller) as well as other optimizations and bug fixes.

Back at UDS-O one of the "hot" topics was Oneiric's default email client.

Weeks ago we talked about the "Slate Style Dialogs", a Compiz plugin that makes the parent (main) window blurry/darker focusing all the attention towards the children window (dialog).

The light themes have just been updated to 0.1.8.16 version, bringing the "infrastructure" for this future Slate Style Dialogs/Modal dialog plugin, which is a new awesome look of dialogs, that clearly differentiate them from the main window (the actual Compiz plugin will have some sort of effect, transition, etc):

There is a possibility (the seriousness of this possibility will be clearer in the following weeks) that Oneiric Ocelot will finally have a new long-awaited professional icon theme by default.

Otto "Chaotic" Greenslade, Ubuntu & Canonical's "Visual Design Lead for Product", has just said on his Twitter account "I'm not making any promises for Oneiric. We're tackling the icon project from the ground up and the results will not disappoint" (he was asked by an Ubuntu user "Will we get a new icon theme in Oneiric?").

Minitunes transforms your music listening experience with a clean uncluttered but fancy properly structured UI.

The left-side area contains:

• "Artists" where obviously all of your artist are exposed

Days ago, the new GTK+3 Ambiance and Radiance brought new slightly visible UI changes, specially in Nautilus, which gained a light gray background, making the toolbar invisible (it had the same color).

Unity quicklists are handy 1-click away shortcuts to one's folders, desired actions, etc that have quite a limited usage in Natty.

Although it's still in ALPHA 1 stage, Oneiric has started to populate applications' quicklist with new interesting long-awaited entries, both static (doesn't matter if the app is running or not, the quicklist has the same entries) and dynamic (the quicklist's "extra" entries are generated only when the app is running like Update Manager's).

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