Taking NET To The Desktop

07/25/2022

Three years ago, we introduced NET for our web projects starting with NET-Slides, for which we then made a concept UI envisioning an ideal desktop-class web application. Last year, we introduced Unagi, NET's web UI framework, with parts taken from the concept UI. Work on NET then stalled, hence the same for all web projects including J-Card Template. We have not settled on infrastructures for web applications, alongside other obligations.

Meanwhile, about ten months ago, our third-party desktop theme stopped working. Even today, we still have not heard back from its developers, and long-considered it dead after only nine short months of life. We proceeded to make our own desktop theme.

Making a GTK 3 theme requires understanding parts of its widget toolkit (our PCs run on Xfce desktop environment, which is built on GTK 3). This is fitting because we too wanted to know how GUI widgets go together. A theme is defined mainly with CSS, like those on the web, which--despite major differences--naturalized the adapting of NET to a GTK 3 theme. We took the skeleton of the default theme since the theme itself is also the least problematic. Well, GTK 3 turns out to be quite messy--evident from those stylesheets--but still got what we wanted--sort of.

Eventually, goals extended from just the theme to a more complete theming suite, covering Xfce's window manager and notification service, and Wine. Finally, the Netronic name came in the last days before its silent initial release.

We have a more accurate account of Netronic's backstory in its History page.

Today, we are officially announcing Update 1 of Netronic. Since the initial release, this Update brings a new color scheme based on Windows Classic; supports HDPI (150%), XHDPI (200%), and XXHDPI (300%) displays, plus an MHDPI (125%) variant of the window manager theme; basic Qt 5 support; and some fixes and minor edits. For ourselves, we automated much of the building process for the window manager themes, having saved much of our time and sanity.

Users migrating from Update 0 Revision 7 must be aware of some breaking changes. Correcting ourselves following Google's guidelines, HDPI is not 125% but 150%, and XHDPI is not 150% but 200%, 125% is now MHDPI. We also title-capitalized the Qt 5 color scheme names like we should have earlier. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

We hope that this Update will serve us for the times to come with less issues, and we will ultimately followup with Xfce's growing transition to GTK 4.