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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.
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.
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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