Re: KDE and Gnome

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 15:51, Hongli Lai wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 August 2003 16:34, Julien Olivier wrote:
> > > Buttons are in
> > > different orders in dialogs.
> >
> > Well, the situation kinda sucks. Why can't we find a consensus on this
> > problem ?
> 
> The reason why GNOME follows the right-to-left order is because the HIG says 
> so. The HIG says so because a number of usability studies showed that people 
> usually scans the bottom right of a dialog first.
> However, a lot of people (including the KDE team) don't accept this because 
> they and a lot of users are already used to the Windows-style left-to-right 
> order, and think that the benifit is changing the order is too small.
> 

I know that. And that's why I say that the situation sucks. Maybe a
solution for the future would be to find a way to have "special" buttons
in GTK, QT etc... for cancel, apply and OK. Then we could configure the
way we want QT or GTK to display those buttons.

> 
> > OK, that means that I can't create presentations because I don't like
> > OOO's look as GNOME doesn't have a presentation program. And that also
> > means that, for a developer, it's impossible to create an app that will
> > please everybody. Or you have to create a KDE frontend, a GNOME frontend
> > and a MOTIF frontend. That sucks...
> 
> Even if QT and GTK look the same you still can't please everybody. Windows has 
> a "sort of" unified look*, yet there are many, many people who absolutely 
> hate it's look. Ditto for MacOS X. There will always be unhappy people. 
> Making the two look like each other will please some people but absolutely 
> piss of other people.
> 
> * Windows doesn't always have a unified look: Norton AntiVirus, McAffee 
> VirusScan, ZoneAlarm, Direct Connect, Office XP, Easy CD Creator, just to 
> name a few. Not to mention all the amateur freeware apps out there that use 
> flying colors and look totally inconsistent.

Well, having a themeing library should't prevent you from creating an
app with a totally different look. But you should have the possibility
to give a standard look to your app. Currently, when you create a GTK
app, you have 2 possibilities: whether you create an app with the
standard look or you create a skinnable app (like XMMS). You don't have
more choice now. And the same goes for KDE: whether you use QT's look or
you make your app skinnable. So having a themeing library wouldn't
change anything, except that you can't choose between KDE look or GTK
look (look which anyway depend on the QT and GTK themes the user use).
And for third party toolkits (not GTK and not QT), having a themeing
library would _allow_ them to get a standard look without _forcing_ them
to do so.

So that would be a "win win" situation :)