RE: Weird and wonderful visual styling of applications

["Virden, Larry W." <lvirden cas org>]

-----Original Message-----
From: desktop-devel-list-bounces gnome org
[mailto:desktop-devel-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Alan Horkan

> > As much as I applaud any effort to depart from uninspired default 
> > styling, if we want visual wow, we should try to make it happen in a

> > consistent fashion, and then maybe we can make it look even better!
>
> I hope you don't mean "everyone should use the same effects". I 
> personnaly appreciate being able to differenciate betweens apps from a

> quick gaze. If you have a look at plain GTK+ apps, they are all alike.

> Visual inconsistency sounds awfully like broken accessibility to me. 


It seems, to me, that this is the basic tension in the development
community. There is the "urban" environment, with pressures to conform.
In the Tcl/Tk community, there is always developers who arrive asking
how to make their applications look more like everything else on the
desktop, regardless of whether it is MacOS X, Windows, or Linux. They
report having difficulty selling their applications which don't blend in
with the rest of the applications.

Then there is the "wild west" environment, where developers feel that,
to be creative, they must have the ability to make their applications
look visually distinctive, sometimes to the point of garishness.

The individual vs the group. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs
of the few, or the one" vs "The needs of the one sometimes outweigh the
needs of the many" is the dynamic being lived out...

Certainly ATT (with OpenLook), Motif (with CDE), Apple (with MacOS)
working from guidance from various Human Machine Interface experts,
developed common look and feel engineering guidelines for their
applications, based on the idea that a user which learns one set of
expectations on how things work is going to be more productive in an
environment where each application uses a common paradigm, than if they
have to guess and explore to figure out what various buttons do, where
to locate specific tools, etc.

-- 
<URL: http://wiki.tcl.tk/ >
Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting
should be construed as representing my employer's opinions.
<URL: mailto:lvirden gmail com > <URL: http://www.purl.org/NET/lvirden/
>