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?

[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?

[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...)

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 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.