The GNOME Usability Project is proud to announce the release of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (v1.0), the product of usability engineers, designers, hackers, and Irish wine. The guidelines deliver both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements, as well as the philosophy and general principles behind the guidelines. Read the release announcement (including a plea for interface unity between free software projects), or jump straight to the meat.
So what reaction if any has this gotten from the KDE camp? The announcement makes it clear they want KDE’s support.
I talked to Tim Ney at LinuxWorld, one of the managers of the Gnome project, and we discussed a possible collaboration between the GTK+ and Qt toolkits in order to achieve UI and behavior consistency between the two. And he agreed that this is a major point that both projects should work together, at all levels, for the common good of the Linux/Unix.
Sure but the answer of KDE guys would be more interesting. I guess/hope though that it will take some time for them to really answer this. I hope it will be a good answer then. We could only benefit of it.
Please report if/when they start discussing this on their mailinglist, I would like to watch the archives then.
I hope it arrives the time when you can choose any toolkit to program but you see the same resut.
That is getting the same file/about… dialogs, getting the same look and feel, copy&paste.
In resume: making it impossible for a user to distinguish the toolkit a program was written while giving the programmers the possiblity to choose their favourite toolkit.
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Icons are a graphical metaphor presenting a visual image that the user associates with a particular object, state or operation. When a user sees a good icon they are immediately reminded of the item it represents, whether that be an application in the panel menu or the “right aligned” state in a word processor toolbar.
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http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/icons.html
Contrary to the Raskin anti-skninning/themming theory, I believe anyone should be able to tweak his GUI if he pleases to do so, and as much as he pleases (advice is a good thing, but don’t mess with my preferences). However I also think it would be UI wise, most usable for most users, that distros would agree on using by default somekind of a meaningful standard set of icons (at least within the same GUI). I’m thinking this while I look at the new RedHat icons theme gor GNOME2:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jeroen/screenshots/null_desktop.png
I think I prefer the the standard GNOME icons which, fortunately according to the note, are still available by changing a GConf key. I dislike icons anyway, I disable them on all GNOME menus, but speaking of usability, atistic icon chaos in the same GUI (GNOME2) is not the way. This rant is addressed to RedHat’s usability, not to GNOME’s, it’s a pity that while making such an exciting OS (the next RedHat8) they ‘fork’ by default the GNOME2 standard icon theme.
There, GNOME Summary – 2002-08-12 – 2002-08-16… Red Hat making their own icon theme.
http://developer.gnome.org/news/summary/2002_August12-August16.html…
m: Some of the icons have not yet been replaced in (null). It was decided to go with an entirely new set of icons to preserve consistency between Gnome and Kde. As a result, the icons don’t reflect either DE’s ‘style’.
Also, the intent is to replace all the icons w/ a Red Hat equivalent. Unforunately, this takes quite some time (as you can imagine) and is not complete yet. So the chaos you described is a result. Its said that due to the size of the job, it won’t be completely over when the first release makes its way out (AFAIK – so beat me if I said anything wrong )
“Contrary to the Raskin anti-skninning/themming theory, I believe anyone should be able to tweak his GUI if
he pleases to do so, and as much as he pleases (advice is a good thing, but don’t mess with my
preferences). ”
Raskin’s theory only makes sense when several people are sharing a
single-user computer, like a DOS machine in an office. It makes no
sense on a network where each user logs in to a private environment
and a private set of files – or in a home/hobby situation where only
one person ever uses the computer.
Very interesting development again … this is begining to fee l like year 2000 … the year the linux optimism ran amok
Yeah, things are cheering up a bit lately. GNOME starts to be usable and pretty (RPM support in Nautilus!!!, SWEET); big names such as RedHaT, Sun and Suse get Linux-desktop focused; Multimedia distro (ReHMudi) coming after Christmas, Dell starts to cheat on MS, office-suites galore… one can even expect to have soon a nice Scrabble game in Linux too (not Wordy). All in all, sounds like desktop share is going to get bigger.
Interestingly too, the latest all LinuxWorld feist seems to have been the mother of all boredoms. I say this is not just due to corporate interest over some Linux Intranet, it is clearly to me the calm before the storm, Linux tornado at sight. Next LinuxWorld promises to be more of a Limbo rock.
All I can say on topic is that I’m starting reading the
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (1.0), I like this one: “Usability Principles…Keep It Simple and Pretty”, Xandros KDE designers read on.
Lets not forget that KDE also already has guidelines in place. While I don’t know how much these conflict or agree a good move that the Gnome could make would be to point out:
1) Areas where they completely agree
2) Areas where one has no opinion and is ambigious and the other is clear
3) Areas of clear disagreement
That lays the ground work for a unified interface guideline. Of course there is some question whether the Gnome Human interface group even speaks for Gnome.
>Raskin’s theory only makes sense when several people are
>sharing a single-user computer
It makes sense whenever you have to use a computer other than the one you have skinned to be the way you want.
If you are in an environment like Suns where you can log onto your account from any terminal in the building then its not an issue.
But if I go round to a friends place and they have some wacked out theme then it gets in my way. Its easy to think of scenarios where you’re not using your own computer.
I think he meant is individual applications by default do not theme by themselves. If a user does a system wide change, all the applications would get the same look and feel.
I’m not sure if this is good or not, because no one done this before, not even Apple.
I think he meant is individual applications by default do not theme by themselves. If a user does a system wide change, all the applications would get the same look and feel.
Surely, Raskin and I can’t be the only one who absolutely hates skinnable apps? Skinnable apps aren’t inherently evil (nothing is), but being skinnable bundled with the fact that all too many skinnable apps have no default skin that is consistent with the rest of the system. I’m not talking about getting a skin that makes it look like default look of the platform I’m using. Let’s imagine I’m using KDE and a skinnable MP3 player. Let’s say that I downloaded a skin for this MP3 player that tries to look like the default KDE theme. Now, if I change my global KDE theme to be something else, the MP3 player still looks like whatever bitmapped monster it did before. Sure, I could create another skin and duplicate a whole mess of work, but that sucks.
I’m not sure if this is good or not, because no one done this before, not even Apple.
Yes, Apple has. Both Mac OS 8.0-9 and Mac OS X allow you to plug in a new theme that makes a system wide change in appearance. See: http://www.resexcellence.com/themes/
Apple didn’t/doesn’t want people using these facilities for one reason or another, but they exist, and are built in, not requiring anything like WindowBlinds or Kaleidescope. Apple originally was going to ship a few themes with Mac OS 8, but took them out at the last minute. They are the Paper, Gizmo and others I can’t recall themes that float around on the web now.
Speaking of WindowBlinds or Kaleidescope, though, those are two apps that bring a systemwide change in appearance to Windows and Mac OS Classic systems respectively by hooking into the drawing subsystem. They may not be sanctioned by MS or Apple, but they’re just as valid- replacing bits of code with their own themeing engine.
Other examples of this on Mac OS are Aaron (OS 8 look to OS 7) and BeOS View. http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/