freespirit

Ok, so I kinda liked the latter iterations of the Graywolf look for Amarok 2. Apparently, not many others did though. So Lee Olson ( our main artist at the moment ) and I have been thinking of alternatives for a while. And It would seem we have finally come up with something that has managed to get most of the Amarok team excited. It is still in the initial phase and a lot of work is needed still, but so far it is already a huge improvements to the overall look of Amarok 2, at leasts in my humble opinion. This new look is much more clean, and actually a lot closer to our initial idea of what Amarok 2 should look like.

But all this text really does not give an idea of what this looks like, so here goes:



Besides just updated SVGs and a new way of rendering the background, it is also worth noting that a great number of redundant borders and frames have been removed. Of course, the theme still uses the system palette to blend in, even though, it at the moments adds just a touch of color. So on other themes, it looks quite drastically different:




I personally find the black one quite striking, although the highlights in the background would likely benefit from being "tuned down" just a little bit.


On the technical side of things, all the SVG graphics has been moved into a single file and a DBus command has been added to load a different SVG file without restarting Amarok. This, along with out new nightly build service NEON, makes it a lot easier for artists to contribute, as it is no longer necessary to build Amarok 2 and dependencies from source, or rebuild Amarok 2 just to try out some changes in the SVG file. Hopefully, this will allow more artists to contribute in the near future.