Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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?!?
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
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...
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.
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.
*sigh* back to work...
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,
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?
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.
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.
Sailing over the event horizon
Or perhaps they got the hint from OS X.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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?
"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!
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
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.
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
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.
...
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
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.)