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.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
uniformity is good (Score:2, Insightful)
The situation is quite a bit better if you settle on KDE or GNOME. Each one has user interface guidelines. The problem is still pretty acute, though, since neither one ships only (or even mainly) with programs that conform to their respective user interface guidlines! And of course most third party applications conform to the guidelines in the same way that Krap and Garbage conform to the formal dress guidelines for a wedding.
It is very encouraging that KDE and GNOME are working to standaradize their guidelines throughout Linux. It would be a lot better for the two if Applications from one didn't look like they fit into the other, but at least familiar buttons, dialogs and shortcut keys would operate in the same manner. This is almost as encouraging as it was discouraging when Apple decided to throw away their excellent interface guidelines and develop new and bad ones for OS X.
What? (Score:1, Insightful)
Reading too much into it? (Score:2, Insightful)
At least it will be possible to quickly identify the differences between the guidelines now, but not as much as I hoped for.
The worst possible people to do the UI... (Score:5, Insightful)
are the developers.
They think and know too much about *how* the system is *implemented* rather than how it will be *used* - which is a very different thing. They tend to be function oriented rather than task oriented.
On the plus side, having UI design guidelines is a good start and at least it gives something that can serve as a basis for discussion.
Re:Whatever happened to "best fit" (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, the coder is the last person
who should be designing the user interface for just
about anything beyond command line tools.
Let the coder design the interface between the
code and the UI, but let someone with more
relevent training and experience design the UI.
Re:Obviously right == controversial? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can never please everyone
Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right.
-- Larry Wall
Re:Maybe they'll both read... (Score:1, Insightful)
Why re-invent the wheel? Why not just adopt Apple's guidelines as-is? Or is the point of this exercise to just try to cobble together in a year or two a set of guidelines that aren't half as good as what has already been developed?
For some reason i'm having flashbacks to a time when we had 20 billion crappy ftp clients for linux instead of one really good client that folks cooperated on... oh wait, that's today...
I saw one poster criticize Apple for "not invented here syndrome", but Apple's got nothing on the open source movement. Years of competition in desktop environment's of all things should be a hint as to who really needs to deal with some issues...
Re:Obviously right == controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)
Timing is everything. Lots of ideas that we come to believe are "obviously right" are indeed highly "controversial" when they are first put forward. Obvious examples include almost everything Einstein wrote, Darwin's theory of evolution, Copernicus' theories of astronomy, Newton's laws of gravity. Indeed most major scientific advances were controversial when introduced.
So I disagree. Red Hat's decision can be both obviously right (especially in hindsight) and controversial.
This can only be good . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
It shows that KDE and Gnome can have healthy competition while at the same time, work for a common goal, unlike unhealthy competition where one tries to be incompatible in the hopes of gaining an advantage. It is too bad that some proprietary companies don't understand the long-term benefits of healthy competition verses unhealthy competition.
Finally the KDE Team stopped being crying Babies (Score:0, Insightful)
I think the web browser should be Mozilla, the office suite should be Open Office, email client Evolution, and NOT a bunch of substandard incompatible(i.e. you cant cut and paste between KDE and Gnome apps). I DON'T like Koffice and the rest of the garbage BUT I DO like KDE's Graphical User Interface more than Gnomes.
This is a very good step, because we should take the best from KDE and Gnome and combine it into one effort.
Re:KDE *and* Gnome co-operate? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened to "best fit" (Score:3, Insightful)
Consistency in the UI makes ALL programs easier to use. rather than the current smorgasbord of the linux desktop, where inevitably, you spend the first hour of using a new program figuring out how the damn thing works.
In contrast, on the mac, I KNOW that certain items are always going to be in the same place. muscle memory tells me how to save a file etc. Linux's command line functions have a similar consistency. How many times have you typed 'somecommand --help' without reading a man page to discover that it would work. How would you like a program that used '--options' instead. I'd be irritated.These little things add up over the course of a work day.
'Best Fit' has to be applied to the user experience as a whole, not just any one single application.
cheers!
Ok/Cancel button locations (Score:1, Insightful)
Second hand crap.. (Score:5, Insightful)
He was always talking about how SUN funded all these usability studies on Gnome and basically neudered it. They basically LCD'd (lowest common denominator, not liquid crystal display) the whole environment. This is part of the reason that KDE looks like crap under RedHat -- since all the cool stuff was taken out of Gnome, and RedHat wanted Gnome and KDE to look very similar, guess what happened to all the KDE features... *poof* gone.
It really seems like KDE is doing the right thing.. and this is painful for me to say, being a big RedHat fan (while it's unrelated, I work right down the street from them), but I really feel like they're stuck in a common big-business problem of "Well, we dumped all this money into it, so we can't stop using it or we'll look really dumb."
I agree on unifying the desktop.. but man, RedHat did a job on KDE.
Re:browser? (Score:1, Insightful)
The reason you cannot ping freedesktop.org is because freedesktop.org is not setup in their DNS entries. Only www.freedesktop.org is setup.
Re:Obviously right == controversial? (Score:3, Insightful)
"I have never seen a statue of a committee."
artsd and esd (and oss) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obviously right == controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)
*breaths in*
is nothing at all like a major scientific discovery, or theory. The look of the Linux desktop is not something we all have to agree on, nor can it be proved to be a truth of some sort.
In fact, the look of the Linux desktop holds no disadvantages for opposing camps. There are no consequences for those who do not realize "the truth," and therefore room to continue the argument into infinity. Much like those toilet-paper roll arguments and thermometer spats that can cause rifts in familes for fifty years. Since the issue is non-scientific and illogical, neither party has to come over to the other side, and pride ensures that they never will.
By the way, the paper goes over the top so it's easy to reach.
Re:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are a precious resource!
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how someone like myself would help contribute to an Open Source project? While I am not a programmer by any means, the interface is definitely somewhere that can use some help in all the Linux distros I've seen and used.
I'm an open-source author, and my experience says that some projects care about this kind of stuff and some don't. By and large I think you'll find that the software that is part of the major desktops (KDE and GNOME) is developed by people who are much more in tune with this kind of thing. They have a vision of a slick, easy-to-use, well-integrated desktop, and usability is important to them.
More independent apps can go either way: sometimes it will be a small group of developers and users who are happy with things the way they are and fairly resistant to usability improvements. Mplayer is a good example of this. They are most concerned with the raw power of the program, and don't care much that there is no GUI support worth mentioning, and they expect you to be compiling from source. If you ask questions they'll tell you "man mplayer, it's all in there." There's no point in approaching a project like this, they're just not concerned with UI or usability issues and your suggestions will fall on deaf ears.
Other times independent projects are concerned with usability, and the project I work on, Audacity [sf.net], is one of them. UI issues are frequently discussed, mockups created and refined. We are receptive to UI suggestions.
So my advice would be to find a few applications that interest you that you think would be receptive to suggestions. Come up with a few ideas for improving these applications, and approach the developer list with them. Maybe create mockups of your ideas and link to them from your email. Gauge the response to determine whether you think you would work well the the developers or not, and if so you're started!
Also, being a Mac person, I don't really know which direction to turn in; i.e. does Gnome need help? Debian? etc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hmm. Plain old non-developer users are most likely going to be using KDE and/or GNOME (and their associated applications), so Linux usability in general is most greatly increased when these applications become more usable. On the other hand, both of these projects already have a pretty good handle on usability, and have somewhat firm ideas about their plan for how they will achieve usability. So you would probably encounter more inertia approaching applications like this, and you would have to become more deeply involved to really be able to accomplish anything.
I'm just making this up, but probably the applications that could use the most help are KDE or GNOME applications that are farther from the core of these desktops. Don't look to Abiword, Galeon, Kword, or Konqueror. Look for lesser-known but promising applications that have a good technical basis (programmers who know what they are doing) but not much thought into the UI yet.
Another strategy is just to use Linux for a while and see what you are drawn to. If there's something that nags you about the interface to a program you use regularly, bring it up to the developers and propose a solution.
I hope you manage to find a project that can use you!
Re:may i suggest a starting point.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree, you don't need 100 different ways to do anything, you only need MY WAY!!!!
Re:We're losing sight of the important issue. (Score:2, Insightful)
KDE/GNOME
So then all the people in favor of calling Linux GNU/LINUX can say they are running the KDE/GNOME window enviroment on the GNU/Linux operating system. Lets all try to make the name structure as akward and complicated as possible to deter normal people from trying OSS let alone pronouncing it.
Re:Bitstream Vera the default font? (Score:3, Insightful)