RHGB Help

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi John,

John Baer wrote:
> Is there a chance the RHGB code can be changed to accommodate alternate 
> images styles?

We would need to work with the upstream developers on this. Honestly 
though, I think it's better to work with what RHGB can do and come up 
with creative solutions around the technical limitations unless they're 
truly horrible. Modifying the way the code works just for marginal gain 
in the style department isn't always a good idea.

If your goal is to simply make it look 'different': what some distros 
have done with RHGB is make the two colors the same for a different 
look. You can also change the throbber animation. We may even want to 
look at other options like bootsplash (I think this was getting added 
into extras.)

> If you look at the submission dated 12/12 you can get an idea of what I 
> was thinking.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fc7ThemeProposalFlyingHighRhgl

That's not really possible. The 12/13 mockup looks quite do-able though.

> If you look at the submission on the same page dated 12/13 you can get 
> an idea of what I was saying. The objects
> on image01 are almost border to border, left to right, but it still 
> looks cut and paste.
> 
> IMO displaying an image in the same manner as a background/wallpaper 
> with guidance to the
> the author as to how the progress bar will be placed seems like a simple 
> solution which would
> provide for a lot of flexibility.
> 
> If required to make this work, I would not mind crafting images scaled 
> to all appropriate screen resolutions.
> (ie. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc)

I don't think this proposal is necessarily a good idea:

- RHGB might not even have any knowledge of the screen resolution (it 
may, it may not.) It seems kind of silly to add logic to load a 
particular image based on resolution - it makes the artwork and code 
less maintainable.

- Using an SVG might be nice but this would still cause issues with 
widescreen as our svg library doesn't yet support the basic SVG features 
that would let you indicate where to expand/crop the image for different 
screen ratios.

I think before we make request to the code maintainers to modify RHGB, 
we should look into more creative ways of styling RHGB. Just my two cents.

~m