KDE And Gnome Cooperate On Interface Guidelines 317
An anonymous reader submits "Competing infrastructures may foster improvement in each desktop, but the Gnome and KDE hackers still know how to work together when needed. The Free *nix desktop has been improving quickly. Red Hat's unified desktop was controversial, but obviously the right decision for regular users. Now that KDE and Gnome have decided to combine their Human Interface Guides, it can be done right--by the developers themselves. Note: they also want to involve 'people working on other non-KDE non-GNOME HIGs.'" Update: 02/03 20:19 GMT by T : Apparently not everyone's browser can read http://freedesktop.org, so the initial link up there now sports a "www" as well. And it's .org -- sorry.
mistaken (Score:4, Informative)
It is a sign; the free desktop guidelines were sent to us to aid in our defense.
may i suggest a starting point.... (Score:2, Informative)
finally ego's are starting to subside and we are working together. i have dreamt about this for years, a common human interface guide, that will work consistently. i do not need 100 differnt ways to do something.. nor do i need 100 different widget sets. i just want something that works the same way every time
Re:KDE *and* Gnome co-operate? (Score:4, Informative)
in case you were serious, you should have a look
at the various mailing lists. I think that you
would find that there has always been a fair
amount of cooperation between developers of the
two projects.
Not quite what it sounds. (Score:5, Informative)
The goal seems to be to make it easier for developers to access the different HIGs for the two desktops, not to create a single HIG for both desktops.
TheFrood
The comment links to www.freedesktop.COM (Score:1, Informative)
correct the correction (Score:4, Informative)
Please note the corrected URL points to www.freedesktop.org, while the old one was freedesktop.org, NOT freedesktop.com.
If we can't keep the org/net/com/new TLD of the day straight, how can we expect others who just want it to work to keep it straight?
Error in correction (Score:3, Informative)
freedesktop.org [freedesktop.org] and www.freedesktop.org [freedesktop.org]
not freedesktop.com [freedesktop.com] and www.freedesktop.com [freedesktop.com]
which seem to be placeholders for a domain squatter.
Re:Not quite what it sounds. (Score:3, Informative)
between the documents and perhaps create common chapters or sections on basic
guidelines and lessons that are desktop and toolkit-independent
The end goal of all of this is to create a single HIG for both desktops.
Re:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
a) Start using KDE
b) Find an app whose UI you think needs work
c) Politely contact the app author, offering your help
d) Don't barge in saying "hey, fool, this is how it's done" ala Eugenia Loli-Queru from osnews.com
e) Try hacking a better UI through Qt designer (it's pretty easy, and if you are lucky, you won't even need to rebuild the app).
f) Volunteer to take bugreports regarding UI for that app
g) Don't propose changes that would involve huge refactoring and throwing away of code. If you do, noone will care, and you will be frustrated.
That is about it.
UI Review (Score:1, Informative)
Please allow me to introduce you my UI review which I've written a couple of days ago. It explains various aspects of the current GNOME GUI situation and illustrates them by using a bunch of pictures. I think posting this here is a good idea so you as programmer get a sight of the whole situation that personally I see. This text has been discussed with the members of the GNOME germany community on IRC and various other members of the GNOME community that work directly or indirectly with the modules on CVS. It has been read, verified and signed to be a good source of information. I really like to encourage you to read this so you can avoid problems within your future projects if you see the system as a whole. This text can be found here [gnome.org] and was sent to the mailinglist which can be read here [gnome.org] and last bot not least OSNews.com announced it big on their mainpage where many people can read and comment about it here [osnews.com]. A copy of the text has been sent to Bill, Callum and Seth.
In case you read the text already. Let me encourage you to read it again because I made some heavily updates to it (also verified by the community).
Greetings.
oGALAXYo
Timothy, that is a bad link (Score:3, Informative)
browser? (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently not everyone's browser can read http://freedesktop.com
Not only is freedesktop.com -NOT- the site in the article, but the browser has nothing to do with it.
$ ping freedesktop.org
ping: unknown host freedesktop.org
$ ping www.freedesktop.org
PING freedesktop.redhat.com (66.187.233.246) from 192.168.0.3
Under Timothy's logic, my version of BASH can't read it either. I'd better upgrade to Windows Explorer or something more "standard".
Timothy:
It's a server config issue. Whoever admins freedesktop.org (Redhat apparently) doesn't understand Apache config well enough to allow requests for http://freedesktop.org. Is it you by chance?
Re:Maybe they'll both read... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly the opposite direction from what is being done, and for good reason. Right now, the focus is not on re-inventing everything, but figuring out where the common elements of GNOME and KDE's HIG's can be merged, and also where they are unique. Then an effort to merge those last chunks can procede by actually changing the two where appropriate.
Also, you may not realize just what an HIG is. It actually has very little to do with what you *see* so much as how you see it. Check out the GNOME HIG [gnome.org] for more details. This specifies things like what buttons you should put on an alert dialog; when you should use modal vs non-modal windows; default keyboard shortcuts and menu names; etc.
If all you want is a more BeOS, MacOS, etc. looking desktop, or even a totally unique look, you can do that within the constraints of the HIG of either GNOME or KDE.
From the announcement:
Re:mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
Read the announcement on the mailing list archives.
Re:Maybe they'll both read... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm really glad that those guidelines are actually being implemented, because that makes Gnome really easy to use (as opposed to KDE, which seems to try and imitate MS. I hate those "Yes, No, Cancel" dialogues).
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/w
Re:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whatever happened to "best fit" (Score:3, Informative)
If those applications had followed the UI guidelines for the platforms they run on, they could still have had all of the features, all of the great flexibility, but they didn't need to have pseudo-round volume sliders, non-standard title-bars that do application-local window management, context-sensitive menus that don't have commonly-performed operations, out-of-the-box unique font selection, out-of-the-box unique color selection, etc, etc.
That kind of awful behavior is what makes a desktop unusable (and certainly if more apps go the "branded UI" route, dekstops will become totally unusable).
Mac OpenOffice very beta (Score:4, Informative)
Work is underway to give OpenOffice first a Quartz interface then a full Aqua interface. The current OpenOffice for the Mac depends on X11 and is clearly labeled as a "Developer's Pre-release".
OpenOffice on OS X only exists in it's current form so that the backend code (common to all ports - filters and so forth) can be debugged insofar as the non-GUI parts don't like Darwin. Once the core is solid and clean on Darwin then it will get an interface that is more pleasing. If they had to make a native interface for it before doing anything else, it would take much longer for a solid OS X port. The roadmap is here [openoffice.org].
You're larger point may be valid but the OSX port of OpenOffice (as it currently stands) is not a valid example.
Re:Now if only we could fix the X Clipboard (Score:5, Informative)
Those are two different mechanisms; Ctrl+C is "copy to clipboard", and you then paste from the clipboard, but "just highlight it" is followed by the middle-mouse-button "paste current selection".
I'd personally be a bit annoyed if Ctrl+C in a terminal window copied the selection to the clipboard rather than sending a ^C down the pseudo-terminal to interrupt the current program - but I'd be similarly annoyed if it did that in the terminal windows on a certain non-UNIX operating system [microsoft.com] as well. (In that OS, at least in the 5.0 version of the "New Technology" flavor of that OS, you can either select "Edit->Copy" on the window menu or, apparently, use the "Enter" key - I guess "Enter" acts as a CR/LF only if nothing is selected.)
Not in any desktop that implements its primary and clipboard selections according to the X clipboard explanation [freedesktop.org], which says "selecting but with no explicit copy should only set PRIMARY, never CLIPBOARD."
The problem here is that people have gotten confused about what the "clipboard" is. The clipboard is not what selecting something with the mouse changes and not what your middle mouse button pastes. Selecting with the mouse changes the primary selection, and the middle mouse button pastes the primary selection. "Copy" copies the primary selection to the clipboard; merely selecting something doesn't, it just changes the primary selection to refer to what you selected. "Paste" inserts the contents of the clipboard in place of the current selection (which could be a "zero-length" selection, in which case it amounts to inserting at the point of the selection, e.g. insert at the text cursor in a text window).
(As I remember, the KDE people spoke of them both as "clipboards" when discussing the KDE 3.0/Qt 3.0 change to make the primary selection and clipboard work that way, in order to, I guess, avoid confusing people whose brains had become too locked into the notion of the middle mouse button pasting some kind of "clipboard"; however, the X11 Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual calls the primary selection PRIMARY and the clipboard CLIPBOARD.)