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Alpha-Blending On KDE
PimpBot writes: "Check this story out on The Dot. The KDE team is getting some pretty sweet alpha-blending going with their latest CVS for KDE 2.1. The story has pretty eye-candy." Most of what is there is already being done within efm, but kde probably has a larger installed user base. Of course this stuff is really only with icons and images, and not fonts, which await the ubercool Xrender extension which does just that (or even cooler, the RGB Decimation for antialiasing text under X on LCD screens). Yum.
I'm spending a lot of life building GUI's (in Java) and I have some questions about icons and eye-candy:
As hackers, we all know that you can unplug one icon and replace it with another, the type of graphic art is totally unrelated to the quality of the code and the app, and so on, but, the look and feel can have a pretty major effect on the way people take to your software.
In my experience, if people are a little unsure how much they should trust your code, and how much time they should invest in it, 'clean and professional' is more likely to give the right impression than 'cute and well drawn'. Think Nokia mobile phone vs. a Micky Mouse novelty candlestick one. (I'm not saying that the icons are as bad as that - just that that's the sort of distinction I'm trying to make).
I know it's all themed, and you can set the theme to be whatever you want, but I would suggest that the default theme should be much more 'serious'. We all love the penguin, some love the KDE dragon, but would we get more respect if the images were less cuddly - harder? I guess this is why the Playstation 2 looks like it does, and why it's logo is made up of a set of straight lines on a white background. It looks hi-tech and cool.
Someone else (rebelcool) made the point that 'looking like Windows is a good thing because Microsoft have spent a lot of money on research and they know what they're doing'. I kind of agree with that, but there is a better reason: Most people who use a computer understand the Microsoft GUI. It might not be the best on a level playing field, but the playing field isn't level - pretty much everyone is familiar with Microsoft's GUI.
To use the same steering wheel analogy: Every car has a steering wheel because every car has a steering wheel. Thus, steering wheels make the best user-interfaces, simply because they mean that anyone with a driving license can just get in and drive off.
One final point, I'm so used to Unix I find typing on a Windows box feels like I have boxing gloves on. I hate it, I find it frustrating. So I install bash shells and emacs, and do everything I can to make it look like what I'm used to. It's a pain, and I certainly can't do it on a stranger's computer I happen to be using for a bit. I have an enormous amount of empathy for Windows users in a hurry who have to make the switch in the other direction.