Theme for KDE5

[htuyar]

A student of mine here at the Istanbul Technical University is working on a KDE5 theme for Pale Moon and Firefox as his senior project. I specifically asked him to target Pale Moon first, and then Firefox and possibly Thunderbird. The GitHub address is: https://github.com/necipkafadar/plasma5-theme-palemoon
Any suggestions and feedback to him and/or to me would be greatly appreciated.

[Lootyhoof]

Themes for these applications are fundamentally different to each other, so it can be rather difficult to target all of them (or even more than one). That said, good luck to him!

Feel free to keep in touch should advice be required.

[htuyar]

Thank you so much. If we decide that it will be infeasible to target more than one, we'll stick to Pale Moon. I'd like to ask for recommendations on one topic: We are a computer engineering department and this is -AFAIK- the first senior project that focuses on something other than software and/or hardware design. I feel confident that the project is relevant and valuable in the scope of our department but the jury might be hesitant about the contribution not being very significant and might want to "see some code". We are planning a preferences panel type of work that will include some coding but could there be other points where my student could do meaningful coding as part of his project?

[Lootyhoof]

If you want to keep purely to theming, you could produce an "options" extension, that provides various ways to alter the appearance of the theme. See Compact Moon and Noia Moon for examples of themes that do this.

[htuyar]

I was thinking along the same lines, OxygenKDE had a panel that would for example let the user select from KDE color schemes.We don't have to keep it purely to theming but I don't want to add irrelevant functionality just because there should be some coding. Do you know any examples of theming extensions that also include non-theming work?

[Lootyhoof]

In terms of extensions that work in tandem with themes, I cannot. There are, however, extensions that change the appearance of the browser without being themes themselves. You can find many here and here, though possibly the most complex example is Classic Theme Restorer (Firefox only, does not work on Pale Moon).

[htuyar]

OK, thanks a lot.

[Moonchild]

Just tossing in my $0.02 here: user interface design is often overlooked as a making-or-breaking part of computer engineering; the judges need to understand that an interface to the human operator is equally important to have good design as underlying code or hardware is. It's a challenge to design a theme for a browser that not only looks good, but is also ergonomic and works across versions of an operating system, let alone cross-platform.