Helpful resources for making Campcaster GTK themes

Campcaster style guidelines

Campcaster's user interface was originally designed by a team from the Parsons School of Design (now Parsons the New School) and masters degree candidates from its Communication Design department. Led by Colleen Macklin and Kunal Jain, the team included Charles Truett (overall UI and web interface), Sangita Shah (logos and icons), and Turi McKinley (user experience).

Campcaster's style guidelines can be found at this address: http://campcaster-doc.campware.org/gui/styleguide.pdf

Window mockups can be found at this address: http://campcaster-doc.campware.org/gui/designs/

GTK+ theme resources

As of the 1.3 "Dakar" release, Campcaster Studio will use the Glade user interface builder and the Libglade libraries. You can find out more information about the Glade User Interface Builder at this address: http://glade.gnome.org/

One of the benefits of using Glade is that it is compatible with the themes that can be created for GTK+. GTK+ themes look a lot like CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files, in that they designate the style information for the various user interface elements in the application.

GTK+ (sometimes called GTK 2 or GTK 2.0) is the windowing toolkit used by the Gnome window manager, which is the default window manager for Ubuntu. (Kubuntu uses another windowing toolkit, called Qt, and another window manager, called KDE.) The terms "Gtk theme", "GTK+ theme", "Gnome theme", "Gtk style" etc are used interchangeably.

There are a number of good resources available explaining how to make GTK+ themes. Our goal with the 1.3 "Dakar" release is to be able to make a GTK+ theme for Campcaster. Gnome users will also be able to use this theme system-wide, if they want to.

Resources for theme designers

GTK+ theme design tutorials: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials

Another themes tutorial, for other windowing toolkits, too: http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/465/

http://www.gnome-look.org has lots of good GTK+ themes.

DannyWu's MacOS theme is pretty close to the original LiveSupport UI design: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/MacOS-X+Aqua+Theme?content=13548

Metacity theme tutorial, for customized title bars etc: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/metacity/metacity-themes.html

Resources for programmers

GTK+ 2.0 Tutorial http://gtk.org/tutorial/

GTK+ 2.0 Tree View Tutorial http://scentric.net/tutorial/

The GIMP Toolkit GTK+ http://gtk.org/

API Documentation GTK+ http://gtk.org/api/

The GTK+ Theme Architecture, version 2 http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gtk/2.0/theme-engines.html

GTK+ Styles Reference Manual http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gtk/gtk-styles.html

GTK+ Themes Reference Manual http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gtk/gtk-themes.html

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.0 http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/

The six GTK+ mailing lists http://gtk.org/mailinglists.html

Gnome ViewCVS /gtk+ http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk%2B/

Gtk+ for Mac OS X | Imendio Developer Pages http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gtk-macosx