A couple ruminations on GUI design

["Dan Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

    There are a couple thoughts I think each of us here has to realize:

    1)  We only have *ONE* chance at this.  At the present time, KDE is
gaining in popularity quite quickly, and some major media players are
starting to go for the underdog OS because people are *interested* in the
underdogs.  (That, and they HATE crashes).  Windows is about to experience
torrential floods of bad press, and Linux is being looked at as an
attractive alternative.  Unless we do this now, and do this right, most of
the promise of Linux will be tied up by the Qt license.  We do *NOT* have
the time to fight--now is the time for work!

    2)  Flame wars, rebel style guides, c'mon folks, we're trying to advance
the state of the industry, not relive 3rd grade :-)  *EVERYBODY* agrees that
the development should be open.  The disagreement involves *WHEN* to open it
up.  If you want to develop by parts, then we can start immediately, and
come up with a mismatched, disjointed, incoherent design.  We'd go one issue
at a time, instead of considering each issue in the context of the whole.
We are making *ONE* guide, not a disjoint set of chapters.  A disjoint set
of chapters is doomed to failure.  This is NOT to say that Tom's "Rebel
Style Guide" is doomed to failure, nor that it is assuredly going to be even
a disjoint set of chapters.  The greatest irony is that, when you get down
to it, Tom will post his incorporations of commentary on whatever shell of a
style guide has been released.  Some commentary will be rewritten, some will
just get pasted in, and some will be ignored, as it should be.  Like Linus
says, projects require benevolent dictators to prevent themselves from
falling into anarchy.  What Tom doesn't realize is this is *really* the same
thing Bowie wants--Bowie just wants to have a little bit more framework set
up first, to prevent redundancy and inclarity.

       There's REALLY NO DIFFERENCE IN POSITION between you two guys.  Tom,
you *know* that you have some portion of a new style sheet on your hard
drive.  Me, I *know* I have some incompleted version of a UI construct
mockup that I've been working on for way too long(thanks Soren!).  Bowie's
position says we should start out with a good example of detail, a style of
style guide for others to contribute sections that may indeed be accepted,
or just to contribute ideas that can be reworked and rewritten to fit the
form that we need GNOME to take.

    Peace, people :-)  We're the guys who are saying "You are doing it
wrong, we can do it better."  Forget pulling rank, rebelling against
authority, and all that junk.  We have a job to do, lets do it--and lets do
it, for maybe the first time in history, *right*.

    A final note--the GNOME GUI list is a brainstorming tool.  The Style
Sheet is an integrated document based on the storming of some incredible
minds, but it shouldn't read like a brainstorm.