OSDL to Bridge GNOME and KDE

Trax88 writes "Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that will attempt to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE. The effort, called Portland Project, began showing its first software tools on in conjunction with this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Using them, a software company can write a single software package that works using either of the prevailing graphical interfaces. Working with Freedesktop.org on unifying interface issues, they plan to release a beta version of the software in May and version 1.0 in June. Ultimately, advocates hope that it will be part of a larger but separate effort called Linux Standard Base, which is designed to make the operating system easier for software companies to use."

Comments

Real problem is a single set of guidelines

[wysiwia]

Because the real problem is not so much the used framework but to use a single set of guidelines. The main obstacle of the Linux desktop is the usability, the look&feel of the applications. If one just uses 2 different applications on Linux, one most likely has to learn 2 different ways how to work with. If one uses 10 different application one doesn't have to learn 10 different ways but quite possible 5 to 7.

So I created wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) exactly for this, to finally have a single set of guidelines. And I designed wyoGuide to be cross-platform guidelines since no serious developer codes for a single platform these days. wyoGuide can and should be used on any platform with any framework and any language. Sure I do provide sample code written in C++ with wxWidgets but I'd love to put up others sample code as well. So far nobody familiar with other's framework volunteered.

To stress this point again, the Linux desktop won't become a success unless it can't be agreed on this single set of guidelines. It's possible that everybody sits together and designs yet another set but the outcome won't be much different than wyoGuide. On the other side wyoGuide is still work in progress and I'm open to any suggestion to make it more suitable for anybody.

If somebody doesn't believe me just read the LXer article here (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index. html) and follow the links to the sources. Or go and read the guidelines themselves at http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content .html.

What I'm curious about is how the Portland project handles this info, the knew it since December 2005 (http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architect s/2005-December/000349.html), they seems to already have forgotten. I've also informed Novell and posted it to LinuxQuestions, almost no reaction. So what else can I do?

O. Wyss