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

In a related story...

[leviramsey]

Presidents Bush, Chirac, and Hussein were found making out in a hot tub.

We're losing sight of the important issue.

[OpCode42]

We're losing sight of what the most important issue is here. Should a unified desktop be called GNODE or KNOME?

Re:We're losing sight of the important issue.

[Dr. Smeegee]

How about KMODE?

What is it about that acronym that sounds familiar?

Re:We're losing sight of the important issue.

[La Temperanza]

G-NODE - the quasi-mythical IP that brinks geeks to orgasm when pinged.

Well...

[DwarfGoanna]

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....

Re:Well...

[ajs]

If KDE/Gnome can just come up with something unique and useful , and chuck the Win98-ish crap

This is exactly the opposite direction from what is being done, and for good reason. Right now, the focus is not on re-inventing everything, but figuring out where the common elements of GNOME and KDE's HIG's can be merged, and also where they are unique. Then an effort to merge those last chunks can procede by actually changing the two where appropriate.

Also, you may not realize just what an HIG is. It actually has very little to do with what you *see* so much as how you see it. Check out the GNOME HIG for more details. This specifies things like what buttons you should put on an alert dialog; when you should use modal vs non-modal windows; default keyboard shortcuts and menu names; etc.

If all you want is a more BeOS, MacOS, etc. looking desktop, or even a totally unique look, you can do that within the constraints of the HIG of either GNOME or KDE.

From the announcement:

Having a shared document will also allow us to start looking at commonalities between the documents and perhaps create common chapters or sections on basic guidelines and lessons that are desktop and toolkit-independent (e.g., accessibility and internationalization tips, general usability principles).

They are missing the ~experts~ on UI design

[SirCrashALot]

Microsoft!! Look at the beauty of XP. MS Linux:)

uniformity is good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

NOOOOO!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?!?

Re:NOOOOO!!!

[bob670]

We can always crack on Red Hat for trying to make money=)

Re:NOOOOO!!!

[Guppy06]

"What fuel have we then for the flame wars?!?"

BSD is dying.

Re:NOOOOO!!!

[sean23007]

BSD is dead.

Is this supposed to be a flame war, or what?

Re:NOOOOO!!!

[ActiveSX]

emacs I still haven't figured out what it is ...

It's an operating system with a mediocre text editor and insane interface. It makes Windows XP look like BeOS.

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"

[Dan Ost]

I don't agree.

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: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"

[teks0r]

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

I would have to disagree. Much software (and especially free software, seem to have interfaces that leave something to be desired. The coder knows the program, and appreciates the project from a very functional point of view, but they tend to lose sight of the usability of the interface.

I'm not saying that coders aren't good at designing human interfaces, but from my experience it's often more beneficial for someone else altogether to design the HI, from the perspective of an "outsider."

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

Re:Whatever happened to "best fit"

[m0nkyman]

From a development point of view you may be correct. From a user's viewpoint you are dead wrong. It doesn't matter if your project has a wonderful UI, if it is different from the way everything else works, the user ends up wasting time learning how to do things your way.
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!

Re:Whatever happened to "best fit"

[ajs]

I have to disagree. First, a good HIG does not constrain you to do the wrong thing for your application, but rather gives you a sense of how best to fit into a particular paradigm. From there, you can do what you need to. A classic example of where this is important is the current trend in "media players" like Quicktime from Apple, WinAmp, XMMS, Microsoft Media Player, etc. They all try to look as snazzy as possible, at the cost of good user interface design. I can't count the number of times I've been at a party where some geek with good intentions put up an XMMS or WinAmp-based juke-box for people to play music with and all of the non-techies would give up after a few minutes because they couldn't decipher the UI.

If those applications had followed the UI guidelines for the platforms they run on, they could still have had all of the features, all of the great flexibility, but they didn't need to have pseudo-round volume sliders, non-standard title-bars that do application-local window management, context-sensitive menus that don't have commonly-performed operations, out-of-the-box unique font selection, out-of-the-box unique color selection, etc, etc.

That kind of awful behavior is what makes a desktop unusable (and certainly if more apps go the "branded UI" route, dekstops will become totally unusable).

Who's with me...

[DenOfEarth]

This is just great...I can't believe they want to combine the human interface guidelines into one document for everyone. What's happening to the open source community, people? Let's start a new project aimed at making things back the way they are supposed to be, with a different interface for every window, just like the command line has different forms for every command.

it's a bummer that sarcasm is so hard to write via text

mistaken

[Boromir son of Faram]

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.

Re:mistaken

[ajs]

Incorrect. They are combining the two documents into one, with sections that conflict annotated in XML such that either document can be viewed as a stand-alone. Then they are going to work on the differences.

Read the announcement on the mailing list archives.

may i suggest a starting point....

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:may i suggest a starting point....

[bninja_penguin]

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
I agree, you don't need 100 different ways to do anything, you only need MY WAY!!!!

Re:KDE *and* Gnome co-operate?

[Dan Ost]

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.

Reading too much into it?

[spells]

When I read the overview I thought they were working together to produce a single guideline, however the article talks about multiple guidelines combined into a single reference document.

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...

[CountBrass]

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.

None too soon!

[teamhasnoi]

As a mac (os X) user at work and a XP (GASP!) user at home, this news comes none to soon. This is what will get linux ready for dumbasses like me to use on the desktop.

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 :)

Desktops..

[grub]

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.

Re:Obviously right == controversial?

[yomahz]

If Red Hat's decision had been "obviously right", it wouldn't have been "controversial".

You can never please everyone :)

Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right. :-)
-- Larry Wall

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?

Re:Bitstream Vera the default font?

[be-fan]

Yuck. TT fonts suck. There is no point standardizing something that really should be a user option. There is actually a danger in doing that. Wheras before the app designer had no clue what font the user was going to use, and designed accordingly, if you standardize it (like on Windows) then app developers get lazy and people who have much nicer looking fonts (me) get screwed over.

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.

Re:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot...

[Roberto]

Well, you can do it like this. I will give a KDE example, because I am more familiar with it.

a) Start using KDE
b) Find an app whose UI you think needs work
c) Politely contact the app author, offering your help
d) Don't barge in saying "hey, fool, this is how it's done" ala Eugenia Loli-Queru from osnews.com
e) Try hacking a better UI through Qt designer (it's pretty easy, and if you are lucky, you won't even need to rebuild the app).
f) Volunteer to take bugreports regarding UI for that app
g) Don't propose changes that would involve huge refactoring and throwing away of code. If you do, noone will care, and you will be frustrated.

That is about it.

Re:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot...

[CoughDropAddict]

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.

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, 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:Perhaps this is an Ask Slashdot...

[ajs]

Check out the GNOME HIG and the effort linked to by this article to combine with KDE's interface guidelines. Certainly those are good places to start.

Re:Obviously right == controversial?

[gwernol]

If Red Hat's decision had been "obviously right", it wouldn't have been "controversial".

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.

correct the correction

[chrysrobyn]

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?

freedesktop.org != freedesktop.com

[stevenj]

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?

Re:They got the hint

[commodoresloat]

Or perhaps they got the hint from OS X.

Error in correction

[wowbagger]

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.

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?

Thanks Timothy!

[fobbman]

"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 good . . .

[Eric Damron]

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.

Re:Bad link...thanks...

[ahaning]

Directive ServerAlias
Syntaxe : ServerAlias hôte1 hôte2 ...
Contexte : hôte virtuel
Statut : noyau
Compatibilité : ServerAlias est disponible à partir de la version 1.1 d'Apache

La directive ServerAlias défini un nom secondaire pour un hôte, utilisable dans le contexte d'hôte virtuels nommés.

Voir aussi : Hôtes virtuels sur Apache

I'm not surprised.

Re:KDE *and* Gnome co-operate?

[supun]

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."

Timothy, that is a bad link

[John Harrison]

freedestop.com is not freedesktop.org

browser?

[Lxy]

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?

Second hand crap..

[XaXXon]

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.

Re:Obviously right == controversial?

[Citizen of Earth]

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.

"I have never seen a statue of a committee."

artsd and esd (and oss)

[vlad_petric]

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 .

Re:Maybe they'll both read...

[generic-man]

Not likely. Apple stopped reading those guidelines years ago.

Re:Obviously right == controversial?

[cybermace5]

No, the actions of a small company regarding a minor change of a secondary component of an opensource non-mainstream operating system

*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:Maybe they'll both read...

[Pius II.]

Maybe you should just read the Gnome User Interface Guidelines (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/) , which could easily win an award for the most blatantly obvious copy of someone else's original work (i.e. they are almost identical to the Apple HIG). At least they exchanged the graphics; having Aqua windows in there probably would have been _too_ obvious.
I'm really glad that those guidelines are actually being implemented, because that makes Gnome really easy to use (as opposed to KDE, which seems to try and imitate MS. I hate those "Yes, No, Cancel" dialogues).

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/wi ndows.html#alerts-confirmation

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.

Mac OpenOffice very beta

[dmaxwell]

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.

Re:Now if only we could fix the X Clipboard

[Guy Harris]

"See, use Ctrl+C (sometimes?), but if you're in a console, just highlight it... But don't highlight anything otherwise, or you'll lose whats in your clipboard".

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.)

And what about PASTING! Highlighting to overwrite in one sequence copies what you highlighted to your clipboard (overwriting your precious clipboard text)!

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.)