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Major Step Forward For SVG in the Desktop
Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly.
Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format.
Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager.
Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."
Now, what is the problem with icons today??? They're ICONS. It's not like they're actual programs that matter! They're ICONS! C'mon!
This will pave the way for bigger and better OSX clones! Honestly, do we really need SVG icons on the desktop ? All i do is click my icons, i don't need them to enlarge to 200% when I mouse over them or shrink to nothing when I click them. I understand the need for eye candy, which is cool, but SVG icons aren't on the top of my list. Eye candy ? www.sh0t.com/gnome.jpg Anyhow, it's an advancement nonetheless
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.
i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.
not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.
with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.
but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.
the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.
here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.
- "the user don't know what a window manager is"
- "the user don't know what themes are"
- "the user don't know what a homedir is"
- "the user can't compile a kernel"
- "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
- "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.
to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.
to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.
not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.
the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.
it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.
it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default
configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of
applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a
windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?
well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly
Great work librsvg team!!! I look forward to the day when there is no more Flash because SVG is so well supported. SVG: XML based, open standard, w3c backed, blah, blah. I love it! SVG is the ISH!
What about replacing flash animations in web sites with something really standard?
This sounds like complexity is getting more and more. What about the processor needs required to expand things like this?
I don't see that it makes much sense. after all 16x16 or 32x33 icons have been around fr a long time. they're even-byte things and easy to handle. and they're quick
isn''t a desktop all about making a useful user experience? if I wanted gigantic icons I'd have gigantic icons, and I don't. It seems like extra complexity just for a coding exercise.
perhaps it has some other uses though
However the entire quartz graphics subsystem supports all sorts of vector based operations and translations. Its a lot of fun to play with. Look at all of the shrunken window effects.
-- Oh Well
Every time they demonstrate SVG-icons they do it by showing enormous icons that take up half of the screen real-estate. Guess what? I don't want my icons to be huge! I want them to be small and tidy. Apart for visually-impaired (read: half-blind), why do we need SVG-icons? Why would we want humungous icons cluttering our desktops?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
First, Gnome have SVG in real time, you can choose a .svg as icon file. KDE should had this for 3.1, but as their lib wasn't very good, they now target it for 3.2.
Second, they aren't saying gnome just got it, it's been there since 2.0, it's just better now.
PS: I'm a KDE user, but I'm fair, SVG in KDE still sucks.
If SVG reduced processor usage, then it is needed for the desktop. Why? In order to free up cycles for actual tools. I want all the eyecandy of E, but I also want XMMS and MPlayer to run smoothly, Mozilla to render fast, GIMP to run without bogging down, etc. If using SVG to draw the screen does the job, then the desktop needs it.
BeOS did something close to this. Although vector-based icons are more suited to this.
I could start ftp download and then just keep an eye on the file's icon in the Tracker for progress... Very useful.
J.
You seem to be under the impression that the OSX-icons are SVG. This is not true. They are just resource forks containing several different sized icons so that they seem to scale "magically".
They might be drawn with Vector based drawing, but they ARE converted before used as icons. KDE does the same thing. The excellent Crystal Icons are SVG-based, but they are converted to PNG for KDE, hence the incorrect assumption that KDE supports SVG. KDE is supposed to get SVG-support in KDE 3.2.
Covers everything at this time. Max resolutions have gone up year on year, but most people don't use the full capabilities of their card/monitor because the screen elements become too small. So having a resolution independant desktop would be a good way of solving that issue (though obviously you still get these issues with the web).
It's a step towards what we should have had long ago: a desktop where you don't need to know what resolution it's running at, things are just scaled to the correct size. It's crazy that changing to a higher resolution display (eg from 800x600 to 1024x768 on the same monitor) makes all the window decorations and icons smaller. Fonts are supposed to remain the same size, but often they don't.
Obviously for really low resolutions the scale might need to be increased to keep things readable, but a 3200x2400 desktop should look identical to 800x600 except for increased sharpness and detail. (You can still choose really tiny icons if you want them, of course.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
amen to that
I'm running 2048x1536 on a 22" & I'm very happy that for the first time in my computing career instead of using the space to display somewhere near a useful amount of workspace I can actually keep the workspace the same size and turn up the font size.
Running a term where the chars are 1cm high but I can still get 100+ columns is a godsend.
Big fonts rule and all the better that I have a dual head system and I dont have to squint at IRC to read the text. I can have it at 22pt and read it from anywhere in the room.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I seem to be alone here as the only person who actually thinks this is a fantastic idea...
:)
The whole point about SVG is that they will render nicely whatever the screen size... This isn't only relevant for big screens. This means that my iPAQ's tiny little 320x240 screen won't have to be eaten up by huge bitmap icons.
The SVG stuff should tie in beautifully with the sub-pixel rendering in X.
Congratulations to the author(s) for their great work..
Looks like linux just gained yet another feature that windows is lacking.
Well Done
Thing is, frequently you want a loss of quality when you scale an icon. Who cares about all the pretty brown crinkles in the Gnome foot icon when it's at 12 x 12? They won't read like crinkles, they'll read like a muddy mess. A simple outline is probably best at that size.
Now, a format that defines a priority heirarchy among the vectors on the image, and a scaling factor at which size various low priorities of vectors are not rendered... That might be very, very useful for icons.
I've often wondered why we dont see any SVG font offerings, since fonts are even part of the SVG spec I believe. Using SVG fonts would remove the issue of patents surrounding TTF (which is basically the standard font format). Now Xft/Xft2 could still support TTF fonts and such, but they could also load SVG fonts. All the OSS/FS community would need, is someone to make the fonts. :)
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a key benefit of SVG desktops: session migration.
Ever notice how primitive systems like WinXX have some serious layout problems with a network login user moving from their "usual" 1280x1024 desktop to a temporary workstation that is set for 800x600? The icons get repositioned to be visible, destroying any custom layout the user had -- and that is assuming they were all in the upper/left of the screen. Heaven forbid the user had bothered with placing any of them on the right hand edge of their screen!
Deploying a "thin client" desktop is even worse, as you need to be able to scale the virtual desktop to fit the physical screen being used at the time. As PCs become more innocuous (think payphones), it will be natural for people to expect to have an identical session no matter what they are using to link with their home server session.
Sure we're still 5-10 years from the point where those facilities are "needed", but without a solid foundation in place we can't even think about deploying those kind of systems efficiently.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
For a program I'm writing, I use Ghostscript to render some postscript in one of my windows, but I wouldn't dream of using it to render my GUI widgets. :-)
The ocean parts and the meteors come down
Laid out in amber, baby.
Note that this implementation probably won't do MacOS style fast zooming (not that it's all that useful anyway).
I think zooming may play a much more important role in future GUIs. While the Dock's little parlour trick has limited functionality - apart from being a nifty demo - in its current form, I can see all sorts of situations where you could impart a huge amount of information through a 'zoom-up'.
For example, those icon badges mentioned before. I find myself wishing for both more informational icons, and a keyboard-activated zoom focus. The Mail icon shows you how much mail you've got, that's nice... but I want more info. It would be great to mouse over the icon and have the connections/progress listed. Or, roll over the clock and have a calendar zoom out at you like a springloaded folder... putting itself away when you roll away. This gives you a really high amount of information density in a small amount of screen space. The SVG icons are great, the only problem I can see with them is for photographic material. Postscript-type files are fantastic and small for line art/gradients, but if you tried to vectorize a photo of Linus' head it would be a very large icon data-wise... much larger than a standard bitmap would be. I suspect this is why the OS X team went with the vector-transformed large bitmaps (someone else pointed out - or was it you RealMike? - that 256x256 icons are good for now, I'd respectfully point out that the 32x32 icons are still appropriate for most modern resolutions... 256 pixels will carry us well into the next 8 years barring otherworldly jumps in display resolution.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to increase the font size when your resolution grows. Instead, you'd tell the computer about the resolution and it would adjust the font rendering accordingly. Remember that pt is an absolute measure (1/72 inch), as in "Computer, make that font 22pt tall and I don't care how many pixels you will use".
It has been a problem for a long time that fonts would scale up with increased rendering resolution, but icons wouldn't, destroying the visual composition. SVG can definitely make that better.
You would think with everyones rant that this was really new technology. Vector image formats are not new.
In fact there is an age old debate, of bitmap (pixel-based) and vector. Pixel based has it's drawbacks of not being scalable, and being bigger in file size. Vector, on the otherhand is scaleable and smaller in file size.
We should, however, remember the big tradeoff for vector, and that is what is gained in scalable quality is lost in rendering processor time. I could imagine some extremely complex icons being created really grinding GNOME on the rendering. Additionally, add XML as the native format, while useful in many applications, processing/parsing XML is not the ideal...
I'll be impressed when I see it and run it on my old beater box that I currently can run GNOME on...
Although, I guess if it really " renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format." maybe it'll be the holy gail afterall.
...is going to be big enough for a while.
What you're basically advocating is changing the "standard icon size" every few years, as display resolutions go up. You also suggest that for print, vector graphics are better. What happens when display resolutions catch up to today's printer resolutions? Will you only advocate a switch to vector graphics when that day arrives? Or by that time will we be using 1024x1024 icons?
As both of our desktops are getting ready for SVG graphics, and many of the standard graphics elements, which are classically bitmapped, it would be a great opportunity for KDE and Gnome desktop developers to get their heads together, think what they want and need for getting SVG on the desktop, and work together on unifying the look and feel of their desktops, through commonly shared SVG icons, widgets, window styling, backgrounds, themes, ...
I used to fall into this trap from time to time myself. See, whenever somebody on Slashdot says "standard," they mean one of very specific thing: a specification entangled in draconian license terms that make commercial use impossible. No standard created and promoted by a company can be a "standard" in the Slashdot sense. So Flash is not a "standard" for the same reason that the QuickTime file format is not a "standard:" because, despite the fact that they are fully documented and readily available for any to use, both of those formats were developed by companies. And companies, of course, are inherently bad, according to Slashdot collectivist groupthink.
It's an easy mistake to make, misunderstanding the common usage of the word "standard" on Slashdot. The same problem arises with the word "open," and don't even get me started on the word "free."
I write in my journal