Re: On User Interface, again..

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 05:34:07PM +0200, Raphael Bosshard wrote:
> i'm using Gnome for quite a while now, and i like it. But, to be
> honest,I don't know why i like it. Perhaps 'cause im like fantasy-stuff,
> and keep imaging that little gnome working behind my windows.
> 
> I truely don't know. But what i know is, that is isn't because of
> beautyness and the style of gnome. kde wins here, three thumbs up. when
> i first heard sun's usability-project i jumped and expected major ui
> changes for the next gnome. now i am afraid that these hopes were just
> dreams.
> 
> People expect major changes for Gnome 2.0. These changes are here, for
> the underlying libraries, for gtk, pango and so on. But from what i
> heard until now, not for the UI.
> 
> I dont have much experience in programming. I can code c, i even
> programed some gtk-applications and some stupid little sdl-games, but
> thats it. I see gnome from a user-perspecive. and from this perspecive
> gnome is a bis... well.. disappointing. gtkText and gtkTree will change.
> But the new text-selector wont get into gnome 2.0 and all other things
> (i'm a user, remeber. no develpoer) will stay as they are.
> Don't do that. Don't disappoint the user base.

I have to agree with Ralphael.  I love gnome, and use it over kde, but
lets be honest, in a way it's just a glorified program launcher, or at
least that's what I (as a programmer) use it for.... I have my browser
(galeon), my email (xfmail) and a bunch of powershells.  I don't know
whether I use it this way because it's just a program launcher, or
because that's the way I work.  I realize that there's the underlying
bonobo and COM type communication, and don't get me wrong, it's very
cool, but it still doesn't *feel* cohesive, you know?

KDE I don't like, it's slow, and I don't like the L&F of it, but what it
does have is a feel of everything working togeather and being connected.

Gnome 2.0, being a pretty major revision number, should have far more
visible changes IMHO.  There have been some great ideas thrown around
this list for the last year or so including changes to the panel, the
menus, the way things are organized, and the way that things should work
togeather, but none of those seem to be adopted (at least from what I've
seen).  I'm looking forward to 2.0 of course, and anticipate the
antialiased text and so on, and the minor changes, but from the
conversation I've seen there aren't going to be any major amazing
wonderful wacky zany changes to the *user* experience.  

I guess that once the new libs are all in and stabalized things will
start changing, as if everything in the core libs are still changing
thers's not a lot of sense in redoing component X right now.  IMHO I
still think that the GNOME desktop user experience has to do something
new to make itself stand out from KDE, windows, Mac, etc.  

Ok, 'nuff ranting for now.

> ps. Gnome needs a mascot. Perhaps a gnome.

Right click on the panel, choose 'about gnome', and then type 'gnome' on
the window :)   (Not really a mascot so much, but still cool).

Best regards,

Alan

-- 
Arcterex <arcterex userfriendly org>   -==-   http://arcterex.net
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if they annoyed me enough, I could shoot them and eat them." -Rodger Donaldson