Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 12:52 +0200, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:

> > sure, if you disagree on the choice of colors in the CSS theme then you
> > can discuss it with the UI design team - as long as you avoid
> > bike-shedding them to death because that's not nice and all; but if you
> > want to discuss the language of choice then you misunderstood how an
> > open source project works. the gnome-shell developers decided, and you
> > either follow them or you can start writing your own shell in your own
> > language.
> 
> Fair enough but in the past GNOME used to share the common graphical
> design.

the HIG is not really "a common graphical design", otherwise the rules
in there would be much more stringent than they actually are. and it
would be kept up to date. ;-)

>  GNOME Shell is radically different here so it's not the "usual
> case". I wondered not about the supposed one-upping the color choices
> but about actually using the current theme instead. That's hardly what
> one would call bike-shedding.

the "current theme" is CSS and some assets; changing it could be
interesting, but there are motivations that descend from the overall
design - the black is used to connote the negative space, and maintain
the overall attention of the user not on the chrome, but on the content
(the user's workspace(s)). it's a common user interaction approach that
is used by authoring tools and by photo editing software. again, this is
generally defined in the design guidelines. could it be better? yes -
what couldn't be. but it's there, and if it's unclear just get hold of
Jon on IRC and pester him to make it clear(er) on the wiki.

> But then again, it's now too late to discuss any of the choices as the
> code is already there. It would still be nice to have a single
> information source that isn't just linking to other people's blogs. :)

that would be the design PDF, for the design side. the PDF is in some
cases high level, or concise in the rationale; could be defined the
"apocalypse". the blog posts are the "exegeses", done by the designers
to explain and expand the apocalypse. we might need some "synopsis" as
well: a short write up for each technology and design bit - though that
should probably be done after the user testing and after the bulk of the
features have landed, to verify whether or not the design holds up in
the first place.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi