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

Nice

[wangxiaohu]

Is this the first project for standardizing the open source desktops?

Will it be usable?

[CyricZ]

My big question is whether or not it will be usable. I get the impression that it will end up looking like a cross between Windows XP and Mac OS X. It'll be bubbly, and wasteful of screen real estate.

I find I usually use a NeXTSTEP-inspired theme, no matter if I'm using GNOME, KDE, or XFCE. That's because such a theme is all about usability, and less about just looking "pretty". In the Linux, *BSD and Solaris worlds, the focus is on productivity. So I think there may be some conflict between creating a GUI that emulates the bubbliness of Windows and OS X, and creating a GUI that allows people to get work done efficiently and effectively.

Re:Will it be usable?

[BHearsum]

This is EXACTLY why this project will never succeed. The userbase they are targeting has such a wide variety of preferences that a consensus will never be reached.

Re:Will it be usable?

[clackerd]

CyricZ:

the focus is on productivity with the windows and macos interfaces too, probably moreso than the free desktops and their themes. apple spends a ton on research for this type of stuff, and i am pretty sure microsoft does too. i suspect you'd be happier in front of a cli than any gui anyway.

i am all for flair in an os, and i think as graphics get better, so should the cool effects. we are using computers, for pete's sake! they are supposed to look cool! and all the bubbly options on my mac that waste screen real estate are easily toggled off.

and, i distinctly remember linux distros for PPC (I think LinuxPPC, actually) that had the most ridiculously cool watery window reflection visual that devoured RAM and did nothing useful except entertain me. maybe that is more of a gnome or kde thing than linux per se, but you get the point. as long as you can turn them off, i am pro-them. if you have the resources, why not?

besides, this new agreement won't do much. there will be someone else in linux-land who will make an alternative to this new scheme and neither will end up the standard, and the whole linux platform will remain pretty much the same as it is now.

Re:Will it be usable?

[cgenman]

While flashy, a lot of the OSX interface helps productivity in subtle ways. For example, because of icon scaling on the dock you can set your dock to be really, really small and still have it usable. Because windows "genie" themselves back into a specific spot on the dock, there is never a question of where to go to find the window. Because interface elements are always subtly textured, you quickly learn to ignore those portions of the screen when looking for content. The bubbliest thing you can do when using OSX is press the F10 key, but that pulls back all of the windows so you can select the one you want by what it looks like. (F9 does that in the current application, and F11 reveals the desktop)

I used to run WindowMaker (NeXT) on Linux as well. The minimalist aesthetic appealed to me, even though it seemed like just a flashy way to open a lot of XTerms. And while NeXT was all about usability, it was also created under the eye of Steve Jobs. People forget that Apple's designs are created to be usable first and sexy second. The touch sensitive scroll wheel on the iPod may be luscious and indulgent, but I'll be damned if I can find a better way to scroll through a long list of songs (maybe Sony's click wheel, but that's patented).

Re:Will it be usable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you high? This isn't about a concensus. It's about a standard. It's about a direction. It's about putting a cohesive package together that might not be ass-ugly. Oh yeah...and to say that you can't have function and attractive aesthetic is just silly. In fact, good visual design in a GUI *improves* usability.

Of course everyone isn't going to like the same thing. But, finally someone is making an effort instead of siting back and bitching about what everyone else is isn't doing.

my. $0.02 ;)

Re:Will it be usable?

[Eccles]

I also love the bouncing icons when starting an app in Mac OS X, which at first I thought was silly eye candy. In contrast on XP, my impatient 8-year-old often has a half-dozen firefox windows when it finally opens, because she clicked the firefox desktop icon and didn't see any response (and again, and again...)

Re:Will it be usable?

[Lucractius]

I can agree with you on that. The NeXTSTEP layout is very high on my list of preffered desktops, as is CDE, but neither of them are the best, ive got an empty spot at the top of the list and nothing has ever filled it, No GUI ive seen has ever given me the flexibility AND ease of use to take it.

Im using an IDE, I want maximum screen realestate, i want to auto hide frequently accessed pannels and things like the start bar on the edges of the screens to make them ocupy less room. Im sitting at my deskstop about to begin working. I want a clean area, but it should allow me to configure a simple way to get access to lots of my frequently used program on the desktop. The closest ive come is a program called GeoShell that replaces the Windows GUI, the problem is that it lacks much default form, (when you first use it you have to begin making it functional to your level of requirements, it doesnt have much of a default) and it doesnt let me have the best of both worlds, a structured layout, with the ability to become free form and maximise the layouts usefulness to a particular task. But above all else, any freeform layout gui should include the ability to define "presets" that you can shift between. I havent seen one that does.

If something drives me to learn C++ and code a serious program, this problem is likely to be it. It drives me nuts.

Re:Will it be usable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, Apple early discovered that the "look" and the "feel" has to fit for a usable system. Unfortunately many developers don't care for look&feel, only for functionality. This is understandable from their point of view since they are rather familiar with their own applications. From the users' point of view this is a real problem. So to help developers to make their applications usable for anyone there is now wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/).

Why?

[drijen]

Why would i want a "uniform" look? One of my big loves for Linux, is that i can fully customize whatever i like, when i like. I use Gnome, becuase it functions intuitively, and has built in programs (like cd-burning) that function much better than windows. I use flux, not only for its speed, but because i can make anything transparent and move windows around at my leisure. Not to mention the looks the people running XP give me :-p So my question is: Is it not *just* fine the way it is? Leave my desktop alone, thanks - i've had enough GUI control from XP/OSX.

Office 12 and Vista

[DaHat]

I am forced to wonder how much time they will spend examining the completion including the upcoming Windows Vista and Office 12 given that they both dramatically affect the way software looks on different platforms and they are now showing us how most Windows software will look for the next 5+ years.

KDE's Appeal Project

[billybob2]

They should get in contact with KDE's Appeal Project, which has very similar goals, namely to provide:
Consistent User Experience
Breathtaking Beauty
Usability
Creativity and Innovation

and to do it all in an open, receptive, adaptive and friendly environment for contributors.

All the organizational effort companies like Novell are putting into bringing GUI developers together makes me really excited about the ever-accelerating Linux Desktop. Keep up the great work!

Usable vs. Pretty.

[ExileOnHoth]

First of all, this is a good idea. A Good Thing. Or, more accurately, A Good Start.

Tango, at first glance, does seem to be oriented toward visual style.

A Good thing. Now, in addition to visual goodies, I hope we will keep in mind when people say something is User-Friendly, or Easy To Use, they are not only talking about Pretty.

They are talking about Usability, which means user-friendly naming conventions, and user-centered use-cases that make it seem like the software is offering you, the user, just the very options you needed just at that moment.

Sometimes, I think some in the OSS community forget what it is that makes Mac OS X, for example, so popular with its devout users. It's not that Mac people love red blue and yellow jello-balls and silver gradients. It's that for the most part, Mac OS has engineered our interactions with the system so that the OS works for us and never the other way around.

Being Pretty, in this case, is just icing on the great usability cake. A Good Thing, but not enough by itself.

Re:Usable vs. Pretty.

[CanadianBoy]

Being Pretty, in this case, is just icing on the great usability cake. A Good Thing, but not enough by itself.

Interestingly Donald Norman makes an aregument in his book Emotional Design that people find things that are pretty easier to use. There was a study with ATMs where they arranged the buttons in different was and found that the ones people thought looked better were also the ones people found easier to use.

Why not?

[yurnotsoeviltwin]

I think it's a great concept. Think about it - OSX has aqua, which is arguably one of its most attractive parts, particularly for the non-geek. Windows doesn't really have anything quite like this, and it could really use it - the only thing is that companies already have their UIs all made up for their Windows products and won't want to change them. Since Linux is a) relatively new to the mass market and b) open source, it would be much easier to adopt a standard GUI style at this point, and it's not something that Microsoft is likely to implement for themselves anytime soon.

It's not the look stupid!

[GiorgioG]

Give people a reason to use Linux instead of Windows. We all know the free-ness factor is not a driving factor to most people. The shiny-ness doesn't play a huge part anymore. People buy a PC, it comes with Windows. They don't associate paying $ with the OS.
XP / OS X are already 'very pretty' - being another runner-up or also-ran-as won't help.

Give people a killer app that doesn't exist in the Windows world. Something that the average joe will say 'wow, that saves so much time...' or 'wow, I didn't know it was that easy to do that'

wont last long

[sl4shd0rk]

Unity and the Desktop have never been in agreement.
Just google for "KDE blah blah and Gnome BLaH blah"
Besides, diversity, adversity, choice and variety is
what makes OSS, OSS. Trying to unify it will be
like trying to herd cats.

Re:Oh no, not again.

[Afrosheen]

The name is actually funny because it's got 2 dudes running it. Of course, as the old saying goes, it takes two to tango.

  I don't think the *nix desktop itself needs to look 'integrated' or 'standardized', it's the apps. KDE and Gnome stuff generally looks the same in each environment, but take them out of that environment and occasionally either set of apps looks out of place.

  What *nix needs is a gui guideline set similar to the Platinum spec that Apple used before. You could sit down at nearly any MacOS 7.x or 8.x or 9.x app and feel right at home, even if you've never seen it before. You knew where options were (edit-preferences), where your window management stuff was, where help was, etc. Everything looked consistent regardless of the company that coded it.

  If this spec gets hammered out (and yes it may involve *gasp* focus groups) it'll be a miracle if everyone follows it when coding a frontend to x, y and z, but it'll go a long way towards unifying 'the desktop'. Gnome and KDE both probably have guidelines for 'native' apps, but that's not good enough. EVERYTHING that you see on the screen needs to be consistent regardless of the widget set it was made for.

  Maybe it really is time for some monolithic distro to come along and unify all these pieces.

It's Already Being Done

[segedunum]

It's called the appeal project (http://appeal.kde.org/ and this Tango project has simply been dreamed up as a response. It's a direct rip-off actually. I mean come on:

The Tango Project is a collaborative effort of a variety of free/open-source software designers and artists

Jakub Steiner even talks about standards (freedesktop.org!! - standards!!) on his weblog (http://jimmac.musichall.cz/weblog.php). Err, sorry but you're not creating yet more non-existant standards to throw around just so you can say certain people aren't collaborating. This is a solution looking for a problem because the problem is already being alooked at. I can't see KDE adopting anything like this as a standard, and I doubt whether Gnome would as well because it would mean some large changes to their HIG as well as other things. This sentence kills the project stone-dead before it has even started:

While there are things you can already grab and start using on your desktop, we are making this public in an early stage as the key elements of the project are the actual standards we want people from various projects agree on.

Right. So we create an independent project, create lots of Gnome-oriented stuff, possibly submit it to Freedesktop and then push it as a standard? Right......

and he makes this comment further down:

Chris, the goal here is to find a sane compromise. We need to get rid of those icon attributes that would make an application feel out of place. If everyone else is using saturated colors, going against the stream isn't going to help us.

What project is going to adopt that! This guy has certainly got the wrong end of the stick here. I can't see this lasting at all.

If making apps not look out of place really is their goal though they can do worse than to just ask the KDE people and adopt the QtGTK theme engine and work on it. Somehow I can't see any of that happening.

Please give us Freedom of Color

[xethair]

I'd like to appeal to this and every other icon and beautification project. You are very valuable, but please take some effort to give us this one thing: freedom of color. Let the user pick the colors. Really. Make your icons and shadows and such derive from a set of user selected colors, and don't forget to handle the implications of that, especially for example, the difference between light-on-dark and dark-on-light.

I know there are some people already thinking this would never work, that they need to pick an effective color-scheme to have it look nice, but that simply isn't true. Given key colors, you can generate a nice palete for icon drawing which still lets you have distinctive differences and subtle consistencies between icons. You'd probably want two sets of colors, one for generic things (light foreground, background, various accents) and another for topical things (like warning, default, movement...), and then you'd generate your icons from template code that could blend the basic colors to match.

It probably won't be perfect, but it won't be that difficult, and you can do it so that *your* chosen color scheme still comes out perfect, while mine comes out somewhere between nice enough and beautiful, without every user needing to hack up icons or have them look glaringly wrong if they dare to use different colors.

Plus, your icons then become more than a set. They become a pattern that can survive many design changes, and not just be replaced or redone poorly when you aren't around. They become true free software icons.

Re:My Question

[FauxPasIII]

>> Is Linux easy to use for you?

Yes. Otherwise I wouldn't use it. If Windows was easier, I'd use that.

>> Ask yourself how much time you had to put in to get it that way.

It used to take me a while, takes about 30 minutes these days. The time
I put into learning Linux has been paid back a thousandfold in increased
productivity in the 9 years I've been using it, though.

The question of ease of installation is a valid one. I recognize Linux
isn't trivially easy for the inexperienced to get set up. Preinstalled
Linux is what I do for a living. Most people
get their Windows preinstalled too, though, so the more interesting
question to me is ease of use of a properly configured system, and Linux
wins by a mile there.

Personally, I find Windows to be MUCH more stressful and difficult to
get set up properly. I had a whole multi-paragraph rant typed out
about how impossible it is to get movie playback set up in Windows vs.
how relatively easy it is in Linux, the ease with which I can get my
system 100% up to date (which is basically impossible in Windows as
far as I know), and how dealing with antiviruses and half a dozen
different spyware cleaners is the exact opposite of "beautiful" in my
estimation. But I won't bore you with it. ;)

After thinking it over, I was only able to think of two things that I
use which Windows does better. It's much easier to get Civilization 3
going in Windows, a fact which I take as a personal insult. ;)
And, the wireless network scanner is better in Windows, which is why
we're actively hacking on it to improve the one in Linux. Everything
else is more sane, stable, and beautiful in Linux, by a wide margin.