Tango Project to Make Open Source Beautiful?

DW writes "Steven Garrity has announced the Tango Project, fronted by himself and Jakub Steiner of Novell. The Tango Project is a collaborative effort of a variety of free/open-source software designers and artists to work towards unifying the visual style of the free (mostly Linux) desktop."

Comments

Oh no, not again.

[spankfish]

Tango is also the name of the ugliest excuse for a web development platform on this green earth. It is, hands down, the most putrid language I have ever seen. Kind of like a mutant offspring of BASIC, RPG, and old ColdFusion.

These guys should seriously consider a name change.

Re:Oh no, not again.

[strstrep]

SALSA has already been done ... it's essentially a distributed system framework for Java.

Re:Oh no, not again.

[linuxfanatic1024]

Did you ever hear about GTK-QT? This is a theme engine for GTK 2.x that makes GTK 2.x apps use the current KDE or QT style. It is geared (pun intended) towards KDE users; it provides a control panel in the KDE control center to configure this. The control module lets you choose GTK 2 themes and fonts, but it also lets you choose to use your KDE themes and fonts instead. It still has its bugs, but it works quite well. I like the fact that GTK 2 programs don't look out of place on my KDE desktop.

In my opinion, this is a great first step to unifying the look and feel of our software while still letting programmers use the libraries they want to use.

Re:Oh no, not again.

[stor]

What *nix needs is a gui guideline set similar to the Platinum spec that Apple used before.

Agreed and work towards this is happening at freedesktop.org.

However you also need some *designers* to realise a spec effectively. You can't get developers to "implement an icon from a spec", well you might but I wouldn't expect stellar results.

This seems to be more about the actual practical work of beautifying icons, widgets, etc. Getting palletes not only standardised but nicely utilised in aesthetically-pleasing graphics. It's really important work. Kudos to these dudes for their efforts: I am really glad they're doing it.

Cheers
Stor

For those who didn't RTFL

[Black Parrot]

It's actually about visual guidelines for icons, not for "the desktop".

I'd estimate that about 1% of my desktop is taken up by icons right now, though I do prefer nice icons to crappy ones.

It can be used for commercial purposes!

[Anonymous Coward]

All the icons available in the Tango Project are licenced under Creative Commons Share-Alike license. A short summary that describes this licence is available at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

It says: "You are free to make commercial use of the work"

This excellent news! The icons are beautiful.

Not Aqua, Human Interface Guidelines

[itomato]

This is more like the Apple Human Interface Guidelines than "Aqua". Not to mention, this has none of the wow-factor, gloss, or novelty of Aqua's interface.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExper ience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html
and
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/HIGui delines/HIGuidelines-2.html

It's a corner of the box defining Free Software interfaces that recommends the use of braindead icons.

Dead on Arrival due to license

[Anonymous Coward]

The icons are licensed under Creative Commons Share-Alike. The Creative Commons licenses don't meet Debian Free Software Guidelines, so would not be inlcuded in Debian.

See here for a summary of the problems with Creative Commons licenses:

http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html

The Rise and Fall of Tango

[strider44]

The server has been pwned. Coral Cache works.

Re:Nice

[idlemachine]

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/ predates it by quite some time. It appears that Tango's focus is more on the visual appearance, while freedesktop.org aims to provide at least a loose level of standardisation for linux desktops. The two projects definitely compliment each other nicely.

Re:Guidelines, not just icons?

[ssergE]

Quite some time ago GNOME released the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

It covers all aspects, included those that you gave in your examples, and I would credit it to one of the reasons why the GNOME desktop is so nice to use.

Give it a look sometime, especially if you are a developer.

Serverkillers

[drange_net]

Coral cache

Re:Agree - but its not the 'killer app' either...

[stor]

Gimp UI devs need a sharp rap across the knuckles. Otherwise, it would be a CHECK,

You might be interested in this.

In short: they know, they're working on it...

Cheers
Stor

Tango clarification

[digitaldc]

From http://planet.gnome.org/

Bits of Tango clarification

Slashdot got it nearly right, but a bit wrong: the Tango Project is about unifying the Open Source desktop, but it isn't by Steven Garrity and Jakub Steiner alone. Steven and Jakub presented it at the GNOME Summit in Boston over the weekend, but Rodney Dawes, Tuomas Kuosmanen, Anna Dirks (site currently down), and myself all had a lot to do with making it a reality. A few others helped out along the way too, such as Trae McCombs.

In addition, Tuomas recently posted on his blog a bit more about Tango: Remember, Tango is not "yet another theme", what I am even more interested in is to really look outside our "Gnome/KDE/Whatever" sandbox and try to fix the overall user experience on "Linux Desktop" - we need to co-operate really. Unified look and feel is one step in that direction, and a logical one for me as an artist.

More than just Jakub and I (Steven)

[sgarrity]

Thanks for the link! I want to clarify, though, that while Jakub and I gave the presentation (well, Jakub gave the presentation - I just helped introduce), there are more people than just he and I on the project. Garrett LeSage (another Tango-er) clarifies.

Horrible, horrible idea!

[Grendel Drago]

That's a terrible idea! The difference between GTK and QT apps is moe than just cosmetic; there are different usability guidelines for GNOME than there are for KDE. If you blur the distinction between them, the user's experience becomes that much more difficult. Instead of two environments running at once, each with its own consistent idioms and user experience, the user is faced with one big environment, but an inconsistent and confusing one.

Yech.

Dock is great but geeks don't like it

[snowwrestler]

It's simply a place to put things you need. If you need an application, you can put it there. If you need a document, you can put it there. If you need a folder, you can put it there. If you need a window, you can put it there.

Computer geeks freak about the Dock because it's not well-defined. "Is is for applications? Is it for documents? Is it for windows? It's so confusing!" No, it's not. It is for things (anything) that you need. It is so useful precisely because it is not limited--you can put anything there if you need it, and take anything out if you don't.

Minimizing windows into the Dock makes sense because if you minimize a window, obviously it's something you need. If you didn't need it you would just close it.

Who cares if all the windows look the same down there. If you mouse over anything in the Dock you get its title in nice big drop-shadowed (easy to read) text.