suggestion: nautilus tweak in ambience theme

Your current suggestion can't be implemented exactly as in your mockup (it will fail with different font sizes)

@cimi; no worries, just try to make it look as good as possible ;-) We know that the Nautilus interface really needs a ground up revamp, this is just a small tweak to make the current Nautilus look very slightly better.

what exactly would be wrong font sized?
btw... is it possible to bring that kind of background to the Pane?
if not maybe a little code-"tweak" would help. right now the toolbar isn't streched over the whole horizontal area. if the toolbar would be 100% horizontal and then the pane and main content would just share the bottom area then it would be maybe easier...!?

@Adrian Wechner
You could achieve that design only by adding a pixmap to be used as sidebar background.
BUT the toolbar size could change depending on the font dimension, that means the gradient across the sidebar and the toolbar will work only on the font size was used to snapshot the pixmap you will use in the sidebar.

All you can do is using a flat dark color, for example, but that is not nice at all (still better white, IMHO).

you are right, maybe a white would be cool :)

on the other hand, I think the implementation problem is based on the container distribution...

now is...
two horizontal areas where the right area is again splitted in top area (toolbar) and bottom area (main content) and where the left area is the file view thing.

it would be "easy" to implement that tweak if we change the container distribution...
two vertical areas where the top area is the toolbar and the bottom area will be splittet in 2 areas (bottom-left: file tree, bottom right: main content)....

with that change there will be no issue anymore.... what do you think?

I already thought about that, but didn't have enough time this cycle :-)

thinking well... maybe it would be better to take away the gradiant and replace it with one single color.

reason: take a look on firefox... you can't see any change between the top panel (or window top bar) and the dark content. you can't see where it start or where it sends. and honestly it looks smoother in my opinion. I like the color style in firefox that much that maybe that kind of coloring (without gradiant) could work for all toolbars in unity/gnome3.

so finally my suggestions to work around the theme are:

1. changing the container organisation (like discuessed before in comment 6 and 7)

or

2. replace the gradiant with a single color...

thx

Seems other people have fixed this in a tweaked theme: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/download-ambiance-with-dark-nautilus-3.html

Hi, I produced the changes to make that modified theme...I was actually going to come here a bit later to suggest incorporating my changes into Ambiance for Precise, but I have no idea what I will need to do to make this possible. It seems like it's catching on with the people I shared my changes with...

not really... what you see there is that the toolbar has a gradiant and the
sidebar not... (with few lines of change you get this)
what can be done is:

solution 1) sidebar dark and toolbar without gradiant (easy way)
solution 2) redesign the containers that the toolbar would take the whole
horizontal width (more complicated way)

finally it's a design decision.

I just made my changed version that way because:

1) I had no idea of what I was doing mostly (main reason), yet I just wanted to fix it
2) I like how the top of the sidebar integrates seamlessly with the bottom of the titlebar
3) To me, there's no problem between the sidebar and the toolbar, and I think it gives it a nice almost-3D effect. I'm not sure why the toolbar gradient is considered an all-or-nothing proposition, but that's not for me to decide

At any rate, I'll just leave it at that and watch this bug for progress. I still think this is much improved over what's currently in Oneiric, IMHO.

>I still think this is much improved over what's currently in Oneiric, IMHO.
+1 to that...

>3) To me, there's no problem between the sidebar and the toolbar, and I think it gives it a nice almost-3D effect. I'm not sure why the toolbar gradient is considered an all-or-nothing proposition, but that's not for me to decide
+1

>3) To me, there's no problem between the sidebar and the toolbar, and I think it gives it a nice almost-3D effect. I'm not sure why the toolbar gradient is considered an all-or-nothing proposition, but that's not for me to decide
+1

Related bug I came across concerning sidebars across all applications, not just Nautilus: bug 927229

Actually I think that with the new theme shpped in quantal (already with mods in 12.04) people quite liked it!