Re: About Panels - aka lynching time

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

Basically I think that the one thing that should definitely, 100%
positively always remain consistent among GNOME distributions is the
"foot" icon in the gnome menu.  I realize that this is usually the first
thing that people change when they go about branding their gnome
distribution, but I think that having this icon changing from desktop to
desktop really hurts user consistency.

-Rob

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 23:18, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 18:32, Rob Adams wrote:
> > Does Sun at least retain the credits?  It's kind of unfortunate that Sun
> > completely rebrands everything and completely wipes out all GNOME brands
> > and logos.  It's as though Sun is trying to claim credit for all the
> > work that went into GNOME.
> 
> We probably should have some guidelines for what's considered "polite"
> vs. "not polite" - my view is that tastefully giving credit in an
> appropriate place is mandatory, but trying to pervasively introduce
> names/logos is misguided (when done by either GNOME or a company).
> 
> Look at how Apple does branding; the Apple logos are subtle and not all
> over the place. Instead, there's a "look" and a sensibility that
> pervades all the products. I believe GNOME is similarly having a lot of
> success with this approach. 
> Here is an interesting writeup:
> http://www.asktog.com/columns/048GoodGrips.html
> 
> Note that we de-branded GNOME extensively for 2.0, and it was IMHO a
> usability boost. For Red Hat Linux 8.0 we also pushed a similar
> de-Red-Hat-izing of our stuff. So e.g. in GNOME "GNOME Terminal" in
> titlebar -> "Terminal", and for redhat-config-xfree86 traditionally it
> would be "Red Hat Magic X Configuration Tool Wizard Thing" and now it is
> "Display settings"
> 
> The Times Square approach makes menus, titlebars etc. suck a lot (for
> window titles, consider the limited size of window list buttons e.g.
> "GNOME Te" as a button). For menus, it almost doubles the number of
> characters in some of them.
> 
> Also, keep in mind the old "GNU/Linux" joke about
> "GNU/XFree86/BSD/Perl/Apache/Python/GNOME/KDE/Linux" - you see the
> problem. If you think I'm kidding, see this thing I just found on
> Google:
> http://lists.kde.com/pipermail/dot-stories/2002q1/000226.html
> 
> Havoc
>