OSNews

UI has a life of it's own - it's not something a forum or commitee can actually change or "improve upon" dramaticall simply because UI evolves by borrowing ideas from all areas.

To have a forum which actively tries to setup these ideas simply will not work, because of the nature of "borrowing" ideas - nobody is going to go onto a forum to look for ideas when they are already present.

One persons menu idea is not anothers, so you'll end up with constant disagreement.

Being a Flash developer I constantly scour the web and view what other people have done, I rarely consult anybody on UI design, prefering to trust my instinct to what I know my clients are USED to - that's the key thing.

It's accepted to have widgets like window maximise/minimise/close, to have tabs and menus - these have developed and evolved over the years and continue to do so.

It's an almost organic process.

KDE may decide to go in one direction, Gnome in the other. Apple may look at what KDE have done in one area and go "Hey, that's cool - lets borrow from that", Gnome may look at something Microsoft has done and implement a similar concept.

That's the way it works and it's the way it always will work.

As much as it may seem like a good idea to try to setup some UI standards and a design forum, I dought it will have much impact on the industry as a whole - the basics of UI are already defined and are a change that is constant - it's moving forward with popular desktops and desktop software, slowly introducing users to new ideas and concepts.