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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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