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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.
Presidents Bush, Chirac, and Hussein were found making out in a hot tub.
We're losing sight of what the most important issue is here. Should a unified desktop be called GNODE or KNOME?
People wondered what impact Apple and their interface would have on the other 'nixes. I am pretty stoked to see what comes of this. We could be looking at the golden age of desktop 'nix right around the corner. If KDE/Gnome can just come up with something unique and useful , and chuck the Win98-ish crap....
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Microsoft!! Look at the beauty of XP. MS Linux:)
One of the thing that is really bothersome about Linux Applications is that they all operate differently. Dialog boxes are arranged strangely, different Window Managers put different buttons for managing different windows in different places. There are way too many save and open dialog boxes, with more appearing each time a Developer writes a new Linux Application.
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's next, vi & emacs developers frolicing in the fields after a nice picnic? Then what? What fuel have we then for the flame wars?!?
If Red Hat's decision had been "obviously right", it wouldn't have been "controversial".
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.
Ahem.
"Cats and dogs, living together...MASS HYSTERIA!"
it's a bummer that sarcasm is so hard to write via text
Actually, they are just hosting both of the sets of guidelines on the same site, not agreeing on one set of guidelines for both toolkits. In the end, this is a good thing, because the two widget sets are radically different on a few key points, making agreement on human interface guidelines fundamentally improbable.
It is a sign; the free desktop guidelines were sent to us to aid in our defense.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
start here
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
You're joking, right?
I know this was probably ment in jest, but just
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.
*sigh* back to work...
... the longest-used, most consistently enforced set of user interface guidelines in the industry for some ideas.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
At least it will be possible to quickly identify the differences between the guidelines now, but not as much as I hoped for.
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.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Apparently FreeDesktop's web admin doesn't know what a ServerAlias directive is.
LFS. Have you built your system today?
I love how everything in OS X seems to be well thought out; XP on the other hand, may have been assembled after the MS Christmas party, you know the one where Ballmer dry humped Bill's leg and everyone laughed, got fired, and re-hired in the same night.
I hope that linux can get moving with the standardized (yet infinitely customizable) interface. Maybe throw in those spiffy vector icons (eye candy!), some way to never visit the CLI if I don't want to, and a way to make configuration eaiser.
But I digress. A standard desktop will only encourage linux. Those who want to run the u1tr4 l33t desktops can still do so, and the people who just want an easy alternative to windows will have one. Or buy a mac :)
Yes, it was in jest, I have no idea what KDE and Gnome are, beyond a GUI...I only have heard that there are 'disagreements' from the /. crowd. I use BeOS myself and we don't have GUI problems :)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
So for many, many months I was using my OpenBSD machine thinking "Man oh man this looks like Windows. It even has a Start menu." Everything worked exactly as a Windows machine except for pokey games and the slight lags I'd notice once in a while.
My dream was shattered when I realized I was just VNC'd to my Windows machine.
Trolling is a art,
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.
XFWM is a window manager. XFCE is a desktop.
--
est modus in rebus
>That's a window manager, not a desktop.
Funny, the author disagrees with you:
XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for various UNIX systems.
The window manager (XFwm) is only a component of the entire package.
Matt
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?
This post was confusing for me "obviously the right decision for regular users" I'm not sure if that is meant in the real meaning of the word, people who use regularly or used to mean normal. I think it's the second. It's a little nitpickey, maybe I'm just confusing myself
Wow I suprised to see how many posts there were to this article, I mean does anyone really care? So their combining, were they so different that this will cause any form of true annoyance?
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Should be .org. .com is some crappy ad site.
Linux: harmony and understanding
http://comic.escomposlinux.org/ecol-07-e.png
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?
A hint to the Slashdot editors, who somehow managed to forget to proofread their post and URLs for the first time in memory. What is happening to Slashdot's high journalistic standards?
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Or perhaps they got the hint from OS X.
The URLs ares
freedesktop.org and www.freedesktop.org
not freedesktop.com and www.freedesktop.com
which seem to be placeholders for a domain squatter.
www.eFax.com are spammers
because of ignorant people like you Windows is on 95% of desktops out there. It's high time that efforts are put in the same direction. When using Linux is easy for the average Joe Blow we'll have a better world.
Or if you look at the bottom of the page, the site is hosted by Redhat. Perhaps the same people who had the hint at Redhat tried to move the effort out into the community in general.
begin sarcasm;
Hey, MS is releasing a version of linux soon too. Check out their website..
MS Linux
end sarcasm;
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?
Totally. This is a good example of where a consistant implementation would help. Either let us use domain.com and www.domain.com or one or the other. But not one sometimes, but not the other or the other sometimes, but not the one. Aaargh!! Try this one: adobe.com
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Well OSX didn't take their software and straighten it out, like a teacher and the students.
--------
Free your mind.
The link at the end of the story that points to freedesktop.com should probably point to freedesktop.org (or even www.freedesktop.org since the non-www version seems to cause trouble for some people). Unless, of course, slashdot really meant to provide some free advertising to the lucky folks at freedesktop.com.
"Update: 02/03 19:56 GMT by T: Apparently not everyone's browser can read http://freedesktop.com, so the initial link up there now sports a "www" as well."
Appreciate that. I'm stuck with this low market-share browser that couldn't handle the URL. Appreciate the bone.
This can only be a good thing for both desktops. It will also make life easier for programmers who wish to support both desktops.
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.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Hello readers,
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 and was sent to the mailinglist which can be read here and last bot not least OSNews.com announced it big on their mainpage where many people can read and comment about it here. 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
A UNIFIED THEME FORMAT.
Think that's funny? Get a load of this.
http://www.microsoftlinux.com/
And the guy's serious. Makes a good point too.
It's not the developers that get into KDE vs. Gnome battles, it's the users. Normally, developers on OSS project have a lot of respect for their "competitors."
freedestop.com is not freedesktop.org
Lasers Controlled Games!
As long as the agree on the ordering of "Ok" and "cancel" in the bottem right corner of a window, I'm happy.
What did you want?
KDE *without* Gnome co-operate?
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Too bad Timothy has no idea WTF he's talking about.
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?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I've got a friend of mine -- who should really be commenting on this stuff himself, but seems to have fallen from the face of the planet -- who is (was?) highly involved in some Gnome development.
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.
Left the corrected version previewed but saved in a tab. Since I'd previewed, and it looked fine to me, I was wondering what the comments were talking about. Braintremor, sorry.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
No, I just left it in a tab after I previewed, didn't realize I hadn't updated / thought I had. Sorry!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
No-one's browser should be able to read "http://freedesktop.org/", since no nameserver returns an A or CNAME record for the domainname "freedesktop.org"
Can someone explain why a browser would be so broken that it would return a page for a domain that simply doesn't exist?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'm just wondering why they don't start by uniting the sound systems ... having two interfaces is not so bad, as long as they interoperate reasonably well. And by that I mean the very basics, like clipboard and sound. Uniting the sound API shouldn't be that hard, and moreover should reduce the nuissance of killing/restarting artsd everytime I want to use sound within a gnome application .
The Raven
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...
... 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.
How about putting KDE's and Gnome's heads together to think how to create themes, icons,
We're all (both KDE and Gnome) just starting to get SVG working, get it done right now!
Maybe they will both agree to use less memeory as well. I have a box with about a GIG it in and I have seen both KDE and Gnome eat 750M.
Why re-invent the wheel? Why not just adopt Apple's guidelines as-is?
... 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).
... so even the X Window System, which so many love to deride and hate, offers an improvement over Apple and Windoze.
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
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
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Ahem.
Venkman: This city is about to face a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical?"
Ray: We mean real wrath-of-God type stuff. Plagues, darkness--
Winston: The dead rising from the grave!
Egon: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes--
Venkman: Riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
I write in my journal
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.
You're larger point may be valid but the OSX port of OpenOffice (as it currently stands) is not a valid example.
Some sound cards have multiple dsps. I believe the Soundblaster Live! has one super dsp that can be multiplexed into a number of devices. Perhaps a Live user can elaborate. I use an ES1373 based card in my home rig that has a full record and playback dsp0 and a playback only dsp1. I usually have artsd running on dsp1 (I don't use any apps that record through arts) and I leave dsp0 open for whatever. The ES1373 helped with my hassles in that regard quite a bit.
However, I'd debate that it was not only not "obviously right", but that it may not even have been "right", full stop.
vms developers dranking beer with unix developers, C and C++ developers smoking pot, droping acid, watching pr0n... mass hysteria... Armagedon...
I don't know about you lot but I have been waiting for a long time for the two factions to decide to cooperate.
Having two competing desktops has been useful and productive in the past due to forcing each other to go just that extra mile in an attempt to be better than the other lot. Unfortunately nowdays, it has become increasingly counter-productive in winning over users to the GNU/Linux system.
The old pioneering days are over, it is time to pat each other on the back for a job well done and get merging (or at the very least cooperating) to ensure a coherent user interface.
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 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, 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.)
I've been wondering about that. MacOS X makes consistent use of the bright, clean white pinstripe look that defines Aqua. Now many of their new apps use the brushed metal look. Can't Apple pick one and stick with it? They're both nice, but seeing both on screen at the same time is a bit jarring. Perhaps their are two rival graphic artist teams fighting for domination within the company? (And I suspect that many of these applications are independently reimplementing the brushed metal look, a great way to ensure that each app looks and behaves slightly differently from everything else.)
Search 2010 Gen Con events
There's a reason why there's a such dearth of people doing usability for open source software.
In general, both GNOME and KDE developers usually do an excellent job of chasing away people with UI design abilities. There's this attitude among the developers that HCI is a far less important endeavor than, say, something technical like programming. And the developers will let you know it every step of the way. The developers also tend to have the attitude that principles of cognitive psychology (the things you need to exploit in an interface to make it very usable) are a load of bull or nothing more than just one person's opinion. It won't matter how many journal issues you might cite. You can't reason with people who think that Fitts' Law is a TV show about lawyers.
Also, if you're a mac person, it's really going to annoy the hell out of you that GNOME and KDE developers refuse to believe that microsoft is capable of making really bad UI design decisions. One of people in charge of this new-fangled GNOME/KDE truce told me that Microsoft UI design incompetance was "a myth". Guess he never saw multi-row tabs.
One thing you want to do is to look at the first year and a half of the "gnome-gui" list (that was the main gnome usability list for awhile) versus the GNOME usability mailing list of today. Notice how the first year or two of the old mailing list had people from a wide variety of UI design backgrounds who brought really good usability ideas to the table. Over the last several years, the GNOME usability movement has degenerated into a "hackers good ole boys club" consisting of a bunch of linux programmers who seem like they'd rather be spending their time in vi writing bash scripts.
Until there's a good direction to turn to, a distro or open source project that actually values the input of usability folks, you're probably best off staying where you are. The current batch of projects and distributions are committed to shooting themselves (and their end users) in the foot.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I have just one request for whoever is going to tackle this task (and it won't be an easy one):
Please stop copying windows.
Just because windows does it doesn't mean it's not total garbage. Go to Nextstep, to Apple for examples. Copy from the people who know what they're doing. Take the good parts from windows and leave the crap behind.
We will all thank you so much. If we wanted windows, we'd be running it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Cool. So instead of taking 6 or 4 years of getting to where we are, it will now take 20 and we will have to allow for major viruses and worms.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Or perhaps it was a reaction to rh8 messing up their software (doubt it, havoc is a rh employee, and he's involved with this)
Well, XFCE is pretty much a straight clone of CDE. Any apps written for XFCE should be similiar working/looking to their CDE replacements.
GNOME and KDE, however, bring in inspiriation from a variety of sources, and thus need to have their own guidelines.
Does that mean that Apple is bad at UI design?
KDE isn't only coders, and Gnome is probably the same.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
homepage.mac.com/max_08/themes/brushed.htm
I have to wonder too... it seems Apple threw the HIG out to the pinstriped window. No wonder I don't like the default MacOS X interface. Give me MacOS 9 any day... now, with a good theme (see above link) MacOS X is quite nice.
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).
I'm sorry, what?
I consider myself reasonably computer literate, and I was completely confused by this explanation. If I have to read this twice to understand how the X clipboard works, the average user is never going to understand why Control-C doesn't work...
Your problem is that you don't understand that not everyone has the same preferences as you. There's a lot of people (even here on /.) that would readily tell you that everyone should standardize on Windows, that the web browser should be IE, the office suite should be MS Office, email client Outlook, and everything else should be by MS as well and all independent software vendors should either go down the tubes or be bought up by MS until there's only one software vendor in the whole world.
Luckily, we still have some choice left, and it seems to be growing every day. Some people actually like Konqueror, Koffice, Kmail, or even other programs like Opera, VIM, and elm.
What KDE and GNOME seem to be doing, which they should, is standardizing the UI guidelines so that KDE and GNOME applications aren't radically different from each other (in needless ways), and so that it's easier for people to use GNOME applications on KDE, and vice versa. I applaud them for this first step, and I hope they'll work together even more in the future to make their environment work together better. Some possibilities, off the top of my head, would be to have look-n-feel settings apply to all applications, and for printing to work seamlessly between them too.
It's funny you bring up those few apps that are 'unique' in the way that they deviate from the Apple norm. They have a brushed metal appearence.
The core guidelines were formed at a time when the Desktop model was all-important, and each window contained a document.
Now, the brushed metal apps were originally designed to be used in contexts that have "real-world examples". This was mainly in the form of a VCR or Radio for QuickTime and iTunes, respectively.
However, with some additions such as Safari and the Address Book, Apple is (perhaps unintentially) creating a new paradigm, the 'Application'.
Unlike the traditional 'document' windows, these windows do not consist of a single edited file, but instead provide an interface to interact with some sort of dynamic system (such as a music library, the www, or Saved Addresses). These windows are entirely different from documents, and are more often than not used for read-only access to these collections of files.
In fact, I believe that some distinct difference between these 'applications' and 'documents' should be a requirement for any GUI. You do not interact with these different models in the same way, so they should be distinguishable by the user.
The only method you can copy and paste with is the one involving the clipboard; you cannot cut and paste with the middle mouse button, you can only paste-current-selection. When phrased that way, it's pretty obvious why you can't overwrite - the "current-selection" part is a bit of a giveaway, as overwriting is pasting something on top of, err, umm, the current selection, which is what the middle mouse button pastes.
I suspect a LOT of the confusion would disappear if:
as then people wouldn't expect the middle mouse button operation to behave like "cut and paste".
Middle-mouse-button paste is a very useful operation. One should not, however, be particularly surprised that it doesn't support replacing one selection with the other, given that what it pastes is the selection.
(That's why I do care what the selections are called; blurring the distinction between cut/copy-and-paste and paste-current-selection can lead to people being surprised that you can't use paste-current-selection to do all the things you can do with copy-and-paste.)
It's not an issue of the distribution, it's an issue of the applications and of the underlying toolkit, etc.. If application X doesn't have cut/copy/paste operations, it's probably because the developer didn't bother implementng it or the widget they're using doesn't support it.
The KDE User Interface Guidelines suggest in the predefined shortcuts section, and the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines suggest in the standard application shortcut keys section, that Ctrl+C be used for "copy", Ctrl+X be used for "cut", and Ctrl+V be used for "paste"; however, I don't know whether they suggest that those operations exist in the first place.
They also don't suggest what to do in those (probably rare) cases where using those keys for those purposes wouldn't necessarily be the best idea. I'd vote for a right-mouse-button menu that offers Cut, Copy, and Paste; I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't do that in the NT 5.0^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows 2000 Command Prompt window - perhaps that's fixed in NT 5.1^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows XP.
OK, as long as "developers" includes anybody who writes documentation - and anybody who tells their friends how to use the system, etc..
I.e., the users would care about the terminology if it confused them, for example if it let them to think that selecting text on the screen automatically caused it to be copied to the clipboard, so that if they used Ctrl+V the stuff they selected, rather than the stuff they last copied with Ctrl+C or cut with Ctrl+X, would be pasted, and so that they thought that selecting stuff automatically discarded what they'd copied to the clipboard in favor of the new stuff.
Matthew Thomas has been criticising UI aspects in Mozilla.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
How much of that 750M is buffer, and how much is cache. Now tell me again how much MB were used by KDE or Gnome. Unused memory is wasted memory.
Johan Veenstra
The distributors might not entirely agree with that. They might not be willing to supply modified versions of those applications (or toolkits) in the name of consistency, as that means more stuff to maintain and sync with the upstream software.
They might be willing to support efforts such as freedesktop.org, and let them try to encourage consistency, and they might even be willing to pay some developers to contribute code upstream.
7.0 is an older release, and at least some of that problem is due to the disagreement between older (pre-3.0) versions of Qt and GTK+ in the interpretation of the clipboard. SuSE's list of press releases speaks of 7.1 coming out in early 2001, and doesn't speak of 7.0 at all in 2001 (their archive doesn't appear to go back further than 2001); Qt 3.0 came out in October 2001, according to the Trolltech press release archive, so SuSE 7.0 was probably incapable of being bundled with a KDE release that included Qt 3.0 as it appears that no such release existed at the time 7.0 came out.
That means that KDE was, unfortunately, simply not going to play well with many applications when using the clipboard.
The inability of Mozilla and Nedit to play together is somewhat more of a surprise; I don't know where Mozilla uses GTK+ rather than rolling its own widgets, but the GTK+ parts should work together with Nedit, as Nedit uses Motif, and Motif uses the same interpretation of the clipboard as GTK+.
In the case of Mozilla and KEdit, it's not as if there's some configuration file that the SuSE folks set up incorrectly, and if they'd just fixed that those two apps would work together. The same is probably true of Mozilla and Nedit. It's also not as if they could've hopped into the time machine and shipped SuSE 7.0 with KDE 3.0....
Perhaps these are just technical details, but, regardless of whether a user wants to hear the technical details or not, they sometimes control whether the user's problem can be solved, when it can be solved, and how it can be solved.
Ultimately, much of the reasoning has to be developer's reasoning, because unless the developers can do something about the problem, and do so, the problem isn't going to get solved.
After Gnome and KDE come to terms on what the new HI guidelines should be they should then create a new weel defiend API in which most of the functionailty is pre-defined according to HI Guidelines.
On Mac OS X using Cocoa or Carbon, Interface Builder takes care of almost all the HI issues, though you can still violate HI guidelines if you try hard enough, Everything from layout to spacing is pre-defined.
Personally, I feel this would get developers to make Apps that actually follow these new guidelines since the developer had a tradeoff of gaining a rapid GUI development platform that follows UI guidelines as well as having to write less code to do it.
From experience, the Interface Builder provided with the Mac OS X developer tools is the greatest GUI development tool, i have ever had the pleasure of working with, if KDE/Gnome provides me with something similiar I would consider doing development on the linux platform again.
-"I'm one of those Mac people that will break a bottle on the bar and hold it to your throat for bad-mouthing my system"
Yes true. It is up to the webmaster of the domain. But it shouldn't be.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Gee, I'm not dumb, I'm probably extremly computer literate, and I've been using X for a few years, and I still hadn't figured that one out. Thanks for informing me, but something is seriously wrong with that approach. It might look and feel tasty to experts, but it's a seriously complicated and messy way to have two slightly differing ways of doing what is, in most respects, the same thing.
It's cute, and knowing what's really going on even I might find it useful, but seriously don't expect my mother to get it, ever. And as long as the middle mouse button is used to paste, she won't be able to ignore it either, she'll just be terminally confused. I know I've been.
Do you have any idea about how many of the complaints about X copying/pasting that comes from this issue? I'd wager it's a huge part of them. This, if nothing else, should be a hint...
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Involving the entire community in every aspect of an HIG debate is a recipe for disaster. More on that in a moment.
If you ask me, the community would be better served by a building a unified theme standard first. Any attempts at building a unified HIG will be meaningless until this is done first -- You cant institute change from the inside out. You have to work your way from the outside in. I mean, think about it --- Your apps will be pretty, but having inconsistancy outside of the app will defeat the whole purpose of having it in the first place.
Neh, but what do I know. I tried to make this dog and cat live together in '98 and got burnt at the stake for suggesting that Gnome employ consistant design principles.
What will ultimately work will be a series of guidelines developed and issued by a small, protected group of people (NOT coders) working and debating in private, while ocassionally asking the community et al for their input. Taking all the little details and laying them bare for the public's parousal is a sure fire way to see that your ideas get completely enbalmed in red tape. Mark my words -- Design by a 10,000 person comittee will fail. Design by a 5 person comittee with dedication and honest intentions will succeed, and marvelously so.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Not quite. TTF fonts on Linux look identical to TTF fonts on any OS, if you've got the bytecode hinter enabled. *However* font hints are optimized for monochrome display (non-AA) and for low resolutions (70-100dpi). On high res screens or with good anti-aliasing/sub-pixel renderers, font hints actually make things look worse. This is why Apple pretty much ignores all of the TT hints and Microsoft's Cleartype ignores some of the TT hints. Cleartype in particular achieves good results by treating the TT hints as real "hints" (in the standard TrueType mechanism, they're not so much hints as explicit directions). In Postscript fonts, the hints have been high level "hints" and new autohinters (like those in the latest version of FreeType2) have been able to achieve very high quality results on a much wider range of display media.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Well:
so if it is the case that the problem can only be fixed by getting rid of one of the mechanisms, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the problem to be fixed.
I'm also completely unconvinced, at this point, that getting rid of the paste-current-selection mechanism is necessary.
She'd only be confused if she knows about it and has trouble understanding it; I'm unconvinced that either will necessarily be the case. Heck, give most users of desktop UNIX+X two-button mice and turn off the "click both buttons to emulate the third button" option by default in the GUI, and they won't even be able to use it. Those of us who can handle paste-current-selection can order 3-button mice and still use it.
I wouldn't wager that without more data. I'd bet a huge part of it comes from the fact that some applications and toolkits don't implement cut and copy as "cut/copy to the clipboard", but instead change the primary selection, and implement paste as "paste primary selection" rather than as "paste clipboard"; if so, as KDE 3.x displaces earlier versions of KDE, a lot of that will go away.
Subtile humour, I call it :)
Anyways, it was changed long ago. Check the latest comic strips.
I'm still confused, because Netscape 4.7whatever that I currently use under Solaris doesn't even adhere to the standard I guess. Which leaves that one fairly useless for me.
I know this is historical baggage, and I know it's not going away. But I can still complain about how much I wish it would =) I have mostly used Unix with three button mice (Sun hardware) so maybe you're right.
I'm still confused but cut-n-paste. But now I at least know how it ought to work.
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.