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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."
is accessibility. These days, a lot of people who use readers complain about programs using images of test for buttons instead of text etc. There needs to be an attitude of addressing people who use non visual techniques for using computers.
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Creating a unified look and feel for graphical Linux apps has been long overdue. Say what you will about their own hideous violations of their own style guidelines, but Apple's style guidelines and freely available icons has helped ensure a consistent user experience across most applications for almost two decades. Such a thing would be great for Linux.
Why is this desirable? Quite simply, having a unified look and feel makes switching between applications faster and easier. There is no need to figure out where quit is hiding when quit is always the last option under the file menu. There is no need to search for the folder button when the folder button looks the same in your applications as it does in your shell as it does in your browser.
Of course, I would like to see this go farther, and define voluntary standards for hotkeys, splash screens, etc. But an icon base is a step in the right direction.
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I was hoping that this would be a set of guidelines similar to Microsoft Windows' style guides (e.g. standard sizes for font sizes, using 'F' as a shortcut key for the File menu, all that jazz).
At the moment it seems Tango is only for icons, so I hope that in the future they consider the above aspect as well. To me, Linux applications always seem quite wildly different (different styles of menus, different locations of buttons, etc). This could be a useful way to integrate applications together.
One thing I just realized I forgot to mention that's extremely important. Even though it's a great concept, a concept is nothing unless it's impletmented well. So this thing has great potential, but there's no guarantee that it'll work.
It is the look! Everything in Windows looks the same and can be expected to act the same - when you hit "Alt-F" the "File" menu opens and there are always (ok, not always, but the vast majority of the time) three little buttons in the upper right hand corner of the window that always do the same thing. That's what a typical end-user cares about. I personally believe that a unification in the look and feel of operating system and it's applications will go a long way towards having larger user-base embrace a Linux platform. I applaud this effort!
If screenshots are all you have seen then it is no wonder they make you ill... I suggest watching a demonstration of it some time and it actually makes perfect sense.
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And obviously, people will only switch away from it if there's another theme they prefer. So if this icon set is well-done, I can imagine quite a lot of people using it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Tango is also the name of a defunct night club in Dallas, Texas. It had a collection of giant, brightly colored frog sculptures posed dancing near its entrance. After its demise, some of the frogs were moved to the roof of 'Carl's Truck Stop' along I-35 between Dallas and Waco. (I'm not making this up.)
The point?
Don't get too worked up about naming coincidence, and focus on the project.
Which sounds a little like Eazel, but what the hell.
I use XP at home ( for games ) and at work , cause i have to.
:P, i mean that everything is in the same spot on every version, all the time.
But the first thing i do after a clean install is disable all that fancy dandy Perdy UI shit. Its a resource hog and gets in the way.
even tho i use linux for select things ( file serving, firewalls, routers etc ) the single best thing i like about Windows is the consistency of it. No i dont mean the crashing
It saves me time when working on someone elses machine , not to have to go digging round looking for the option i need.
This is where i feel distros like Ubuntu will help on the desktop, givin that "Windows Feel" , without all the crap that comes along with it.
Is it there yet, no i dont think so, but its sure moving forward awful fast.
Every time GNOME or KDE or some distro vendor decides to change their theme, TigerT, JimMac, and Steven Garrity have to redesign all the icons. I predict that soon after the Tango project is finished someone will decide that "it looks too XP/Aqua-like" or "my distro looks just like all the others" and the designers will be back at work.
What they are doing doesn't restrict choice. It will always be there for those that want to change themes or icon sets.
Having seen various distros expend energy over and over again getting Openoffice/Firefox/GNOME/KDE to look somewhat similar it seems like a waste of energy. If they can get to a situation where the defaults for each app play nice then perhaps they can focus more resources on making real improvements to free software and less on kludging things together to create the latest 'bluecurve'. It makes sense to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort by pushing the changes back to the source. If distros (or anyone else) then wants to do their own thing then they are free to do so but it is insane for them to need to do so if they want a consistant look.
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Tell me how round buttons effect productivity. At all. They are not even round. They are rounded sqaures and are EASY TO CLICK. If Windows has small close buttons and Linux came out with buttons that were 100px sqaure, would you be cumming yourself?
Sounds like your are so insecure in your geekness/masculinity that you worry over the color of a button. You can disable the Windows themes service with just a few clicks.
The first thing 1% of KDE/GNOME/etc. users do is switch the theme they're using
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I don't really understand how you perceive the visual appearance, or the theme of a tool, as the deciding factor of the tool's usefulness. Yes, people want to use UNIX because they want to get work done, but it's the wide array of utilities and applications for UNIX that enable this, not its choice of Motif/CDE vs. Aqua.
Sometimes all that graphics crap even works out for the better -- Expose on OS X is a real time saver, and has no equivalent in the Windows or Linux world. (Note: I am not an Apple fanboy. I own a PC.)
with bazzilion other themes,icons ,widgets ,windows managers and other crap? - yet so far no linux distro has side mouse buttons working by default ,shift+numpad is still fucked up as well.
not even mentioning the horrid stat of APi, binary and packages compatibility.
Linux is already pretty. -prettiness is not linux problem nowdays ( I dont think honestly it ever was) .
If it's fast, and has the capability for "flashy" to be added in easily, so that people can download a theme to cover over it or modify their darn icons into stupid creatures or shapes, then I'm sure it will be adopted as a godsend by the Windows hordes looking to migrate to something that is familiar.
Linux has suffered too long by having its brand diluted with no unifying logo besides the penguin Tux. And there's only so much you can do with a chubby little black and orange/yellow bird. What's most important is the "Start" buttons work the same as they do in windows, and that Radio Buttons don't show abmiguous shadows so you never know if it's pressed in already, or if it's popped out.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"If screenshots are all you have seen then it is no wonder they make you ill... I suggest watching a demonstration of it some time and it actually makes perfect sense."
Good advice, but since this is Slashdot, you can expect 9 out of the 10 people who see a demonstration will ignore the obvious benefits and cook up other petty reasons to not like the software. "I don't see why they're bothering with this, it won't work if the computer isn't on! (Score 5, Insightful)"
Just once I'd like to hear "Oh... well yeah I see why Microsoft did that. I'm not sure it'll work, but let's wait and see what happens when I've had a chance to actually try it."
"Derp de derp."
Something like SymphonyOS' usability guidelines becoming popular in the OSS community would be awesome. In my experience, the second biggest problem people have with changing software (after file compatibility) is having to re-learn where everything is within the menu system, context menus, etc. Having a 'cockpit' of a program's most-used functions laid out in front of you with no nesting, scrolling, or drilling-down is very natural and easy to interact with, and addresses one of the biggest computer interface problems of today.
...But the ugly-colored icons are nice too.
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I'm inclined to believe that having two completely different icons for the "save" button, for instance, takes more time for the brain to locate and process. Having consistency increases usability for me because I don't have to switch from one "mode" to another, visually.
Until you minimise and restore a few more windows (that all look the same) and change the order of the window list, that is.
The Dock is a UI freakin' train wreck, and no amount of flashy graphics will change that.
People forget that Apple's designs are created to be usable first and sexy second.
They *used* to be. However, it's plain to see that OS X/Aqua was built to be flashy first and usable second.
For example, macosx windows have dropshadows that give the appearance of visual depth, causing the focused window to appear to stand out from the others. Could the focused window simply have been made hot pink, to further clarify which it is? Sure, but seeing that flash around every time you changed focus would be distracting. Working with your brain's normal spatial perception to focus your attention in ways of which you're probably not consciously aware is much more elegant and efficient.
I can't look at the project page right now (but it sure is an intuitive 404!), but if their focus is on thought-out interaction design along these lines, rather than just mimicking Windows, some real progress stands to be made.
User interaction design has precious little to do with themes and icon sets.
The important point is that whatever we *choose*, there should be a uniform way to apply this across all applications.
A user should be able to choose a look-and-feel, be it NextStep, Ion, KDE, GNOME, Windows, MacOS, or whatever they hell they happen to be in love with, and *all* applications should follow this choice. Given the way that windowing libraries work, this is not hard, as all of them have the same 'basic' widgets; the problem is that everybody and their mother has implemented their own widget library, each having a different look-and-feel, and none of them being 'theme-compatible' with the others.
There is nothing wrong with GTK, QT, WX-Windows, and Java Swing all being around -- the problem is that getting all of the above to look the same is all but impossible.
There's a lot of other big usability nits that people put down to 'choice', but which really boil down to 'developer laziness' or just 'lack of foresight'. I hate that, despite my having been a Linux user and professional sysadmin for six years, that I still can't figure out how to be able to input in Japanese, German and English in all of my applications from within X. I hate that every application that isn't part of KDE or GNOME seems to need its own differently-functioning file manager, and that I can't just copy a bunch of formatted text from OOo, dump it into an xterm, and get plain text.
This is why there is a shiny new PowerBook 12" sitting on my coffee table. I want to spend my time working on my projects and writing open-source apps, not dealing with fundamental flaws in my user interface. Flaws which I'd love to fix, but which are so deep that they are otherwise unchangable.
Don't get me wrong. I love Linux on my servers, especially Debian, but as a workstation, I've been more than a little disappointed.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
They designed the Firefox and Thunderbird logos? They're terrible. They look good when they're a couple of inches across in Photoshop or whatever but they sure don't look good on a toolbar. The IE "e", AIM's walking man, Word's "W" and Yahoo Messenger's open-mouthed smiley all look better and are more distinctive.
Insert witty sig here.