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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."
Tango Project to Make Open Source Beautiful?
What could be more beautiful? Is it not?
"For Great Justice."
Is this the first project for standardizing the open source desktops?
Tango is also the name of the ugliest excuse for a web development platform on this green earth. It is, hands down, the most putrid language I have ever seen. Kind of like a mutant offspring of BASIC, RPG, and old ColdFusion.
These guys should seriously consider a name change.
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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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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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
The ______ Agenda
It's actually about visual guidelines for icons, not for "the desktop".
I'd estimate that about 1% of my desktop is taken up by icons right now, though I do prefer nice icons to crappy ones.
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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!
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.
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.
The icons are licensed under Creative Commons Share-Alike. The Creative Commons licenses don't meet Debian Free Software Guidelines, so would not be inlcuded in Debian.
See here for a summary of the problems with Creative Commons licenses:
http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html
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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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.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy