Merge lp://staging/~alanbell/onboard/branding into lp://staging/~onboard/onboard/main

screenshot of before and after http://people.ubuntu.com/~alanbell/unityvirtualbox.png

Hi Alan, the layout looks nice, I would like to add my vote for including the design.
Alas, I'm currently not in favor of directly merging the patch. I see a couple of problems with it:

1) Changing the hard-coded stroke color visually breaks the remaining layouts as well as user defined layouts we have no control over.

2) Changing the hard-coded font to Ubuntu may pose problems for distributions other than Ubuntu.

3) Forced shades of Aubergine, though nice on my eyes and suiting Natty well, may not mix well with other distributions desktops.

Here is an alternative vision:

Onboard grows "Themes". Themes separate out color information from the current layout files and allow for custom fonts, round corners, super-key symbol etc.
An Ambiance theme for Ubuntu would be included according to your design, as well as high contrast- and Onboard classic colors.

I have some time to spare currently and have started working on a prototype. There may be something usable by next week.

I realize though that an SRU for Natty is probably out of the question. In my opinion, at this point in the release cycle it may be wise to add your patch to the Ubuntu package.

1) Actually by happy coincidence I think the hard coded stroke colour defines the edges of the keys rather well in the Full-Dark layout, but I take your point, #dd4814 keycap edges is a very ubuntuish thing (which is why I did it)

2) yes, changing the font to Ubuntu does potentially cause issues for other distros (is anyone else using onboard? - the keys are brown in trunk because it was designed for Ubuntu)

3) Agreed

themes would be great. I can see need for a primary school theme and layout (bright colours, just alpha keys no punctuation other than full stop and comma, lower case keycaps, handwriting font)

luckily enough we shoved a bunch of free software logos in the private use area of the Ubuntu font, so that could be handy for the super key logo on other distros.

> (is anyone else using onboard?
Probably not that many, but I'm seeing current bug reports from Fedora and Mint users.

> the keys are brown in trunk because it was designed for Ubuntu)
I wasn't aware of that, interesting. The dark keyboard was my home grown contribution though.

> themes would be great. I can see need for a primary school theme and layout (bright colours, > just alpha keys no punctuation other than full stop and comma, lower case keycaps, handwriting font)
Sure, why not, although that's actually a special case with a rather strong link between layout and presentation. That would probably have done well with the current system too.

Also perhaps an Android/smart phone layout:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/onboard/+bug/766997

Alan, I went ahead and merged it locally without the hard coded stuff. The rest will come later with theming. Your layout has morphed into preliminary theme files already. It'll take some time until I push everything to the main branch though. Thanks for the patches.
Would you like to do a primary school layout?