KDE And Gnome Cooperate On Interface Guidelines

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.

Comments

Whatever happened to "best fit"

[amigaluvr]

Best Fit is when something is made so that it is as good as it can be, not when it is weighed down by things that are unnecessary

The idea of human interface guidelines is restrictive from the start. Nobody know's better than the coder who codes and application how it should work. Having guidelines written beforehand that should say how it works doesn't make complete sense.

Look at apple and their rejection of tabbed browsing. Thats something that has adapted from systems that work well, yet they're saying "no not on our turf".

Then turn around and the apple web site is all tabbed anyway. Websites have better interfaces as they are made to fit each purpose.

Each application needs freedom. Having them all with exactly the same system is like a monoculture.

Re:Whatever happened to "best fit"

[sporty]

Best Fit is when something is made so that it is as good as it can be, not when it is weighed down by things that are unnecessary

There's a problem with best-fit. Sometimes, you wind up with two interfaces on two different systems, that use similar widgets, but do totally BAD things. For instance, a simple good thing.

I hit google.com, the cursor is defaulted to the search box. It speeds up my day by a fraction, but I like the convienence of not having to tab a bunch of times. Well, i never counted, because I noticed the behavior.

Now for a bad one. My school uses something called WEBSIMS. You login, you can see your bill, and register for courses. It's a type of middleware. The one thing it does that pisses me off, only because it is the odd-man-out, is when I finished typing in my fixed-length id number, it auto tabs to the password field. I usually fill out forms, hitting tab to go to the next field. It makes for quick input for me, since I'm a touch typist. Now when websims login page does that to me, i wind up hitting tab, and going not to the next field, but to a button. Great, now i have to shift-tab or use the mouse. It's annoying since it's unexpected behavior.

Guidelines are good. They get people to do things consistently, so menu's, buttons and widgets are used in some similar fashion. Some guidelines don't work out. Apple's no-tabbed-browser is just one thing they stick by. Nothing wrong with that. They just don't use MDI very often, if at all. That's their rule, you don't have to follow it, but for the sake of consistency, it's advised not to.

Having your systems all behave in similar fashions isn't a monoculture unless they all do the save behavior in the same fashion down to a tee. Guess what I'm saying, it's not so black and white. Restrict some things but give enough freedom to do things right.

Re:Whatever happened to "best fit"

[patter]

Nobody know's better than the coder who codes and application how it should work.

Yeah right, so we should just let everyone make their own decisions on what order menus go in? Or perhaps you'd like to go back to early GUIs (kinda) like Windows 3.1 in which every applications file dialog was different.

Sorry, most programmers don't have a hot damn clue when it comes to users. We're too far removed from the average luser's problems.

All it took for me to have to 'help' lots of users in some environments was for some application to have something 'relocated' because the programmer knew best.

Users don't want clever, they want consistent, move one item in a menu because you 'know better' and you render your application unusable to the vast majority of users.

Guidelines should be negotiable, but Apple who's really always had a leg up on the competition has consistency from what little experience I have with them above all else. At least in the basic things like where things are in the interface.

Once the platform has established an idiom, if we're too dumb to figure it out as programmers or think we know better, we need to be slapped down.

Yes, I'd agree about _some_ websites. However, I've seen enough that cause me trouble to say that that freedom is a bad thing. ;).

Re:Whatever happened to "best fit"

[MobyDisk]

I highly recommend that you:
1) Spend some time training end users how to use basic tasks such as GUI stuff (copying files, moving windows) then try office apps (word processors, spreadsheets) and you will be amazed. Alternatively, take a good course on user interface design, or Medical Informatics. The average user cannot recognize something as a check box, unless it the same as the ones they know. Even bits of shading and color can make them unable to recognize the screen as anything other than colors. It just "looks to complicated" and they turn off their brains.

Apple realized this long ago. MS hasn't (hence, Windows XP was born). There are a great many articles available at the ACM Digital Library regarding user interface design and experiments. There are certain user interface rules are that pretty much accepted as fact, since they have so much research behind them. Apple is very consistent at following them, which is why people think Apples aer easy to use, even though most techies look at them as really being the same. It's the subtleties that we don't see. A quick list from my memory:

- Dynamic menus are always slower than static menus
(You know the rearranging menus in Office 2000/Windows 2000?)
- Vertical scrolling is easier than horizontal scrolling
- Multimodal interfaces are faster if they are properly paired
(Ex: Keyboard=okay, Mouse+Keyboard = excellent, Joystick+Keyboard=bad)
- Consistency is more important than feature set

Sort of off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

But I hope that application designers will work to ensure that their applications are tiled window manager friendly. Popping up new windows is harmful to the interface, and screws up the display in tiling window managers like ion.

Bitstream Vera the default font?

[PRR]

Since the Bitstream people were kind enough to be the first to donate a good TTF for use with Linux, would it be likely that Gnome/KDE would standardize on Bitstream Vera as the default (true type) font for their desktops?

Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot...

[thatguywhoiam]

But this seems as good a place as any...

I'm a graphic designer who's done a lot of interface design, as well as being an avid follower of human-computer interface trends and issues.

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.

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.

Re:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot...

[LinuxGeek8]

If you want to give feedback, or help out with design an interface, you could join a mailinglist of Gnome or Kde, I assume both projects have mailinglists for this.
You could also join the mailinglist of a distro, and see if the installer, or the config utilities need some suggestions. I'm not sure if the debian distro would be a good choice, most of their tools are not graphical, but of course they have an interface.
Maybe the best thing is to just join a mailinglist of a project with which you can feel attached. If you like Gnome, and have something with it, it will make it interesting for you. As a mac person, Gnome might be that for you, the Gnome2 interface is modelled more after the mac than the Kde interface.

Hosted by the makers of blue curve

[thinkliberty]

http://www.freedesktop.org/ Website hosted by Red Hat, Inc. Is this a cry for help? They need to fix the abomination that is blue curve?

How about common SVG implementations?

[Anonymous Coward]

A few stories ago (on /.) librsvg was mentioned, and how great the gnomedesktoplooks with it. We might be ready to start building icons, widgets, themes, ... for svg,itwilllook great,but it could be better...

How about putting KDE's and Gnome's heads together to think how to create themes, icons, ... and store them in the file system (think about config files too here) so both KDE and Gnome can use a common base of SVG themes.

We're all (both KDE and Gnome) just starting to get SVG working, get it done right now!

KDE/Gnome have an opportunity to improve on Apple

[FreeUser]

Why re-invent the wheel? Why not just adopt Apple's guidelines as-is?

Because Apple's 1 button mouse is an affront to humankind.

Seriously, Apple's interface is nice, and they will likely borrow a plethora of good ideas from Apple, but they should not adopt their standard "as is" without question. There are bozo aspects to Apple's interface, the one-button mouse being the most obvious (and before you suggest Apple doesn't need additional mouse buttons, think again. They've had to cobble on the equivelent functionality in a much less intuitive fashion ... by requiring users to hold down the apple key while pressing the mouse button for operations that in the UNIX or Windoze world would use the right mouse button).

Finally, they can have my single clock middle-button paste feature I've enjoyed under X all these years when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Windows and Apple do not make cutting and pasting text nearly as easy as X ... so even the X Window System, which so many love to deride and hate, offers an improvement over Apple and Windoze.

Focus follows mouse is another example of a feature common in X window managers, lacking in Windoze, and certainly not the default (if available at all) under Apple OS.

So, while Apple has much good to offer, they are not the be-all, end-all of GUI interfaces, anymore than Microsoft, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, or any other particular entity is. They come to the table with a great deal of experience, and a great deal to offer, but God(tm) they are not.