I agree with Vexorian. The wood floor is just a mimic of OSX. I would be more impressed with a design that addresses the standard Gnome desktop. AWN is still very buggy, so presenting it in this way is misleading.

I also went to the trouble of downloading this near-working theme. A major drawback to all of these dark themes is their lack of emphasis on window and tab state. There is little or no difference in the appearance of an active window and an inactive window. It might be pretty, but it’s worthless when it includes usability oversights like these. They have to work and degrade gracefully if 3-d video isn’t available.

Also, the reason why themes like this don’t get chosen is because they are too far beyond reality and only appear good. If you people actually use the Human theme you’ll find it is simple and enough. Not all people can use Compiz or enable transparency, and because of that, themes that heavily depend on it (such as this one) will fail. Thus ends my rant on flamers of the NewHuman theme in Intrepid alpha. (Although there’s a rumor that NewHuman is only being used in the alphas to make sure dark themes work with 8.10.)

1. OS/X dock rip off, we will not ever beat apple if we merely imitate their dysfunctional interface.
2. Dark theme: Yes sounds like a great idea, things that just don’t work with Dark themes: WYSIWG editors, 90% of the relevant world wide web. WINE, etc, etc, etc.

Hope we see something this nice in Intrepid. Finally Shuttleworth is really making a point of beautifying the UI and it’s about time.

Not so fond of the wood paneling background, but the color values are good.

But overall, it looks impressive, and vastly improved from Hardy.