Re: A couple ruminations on GUI design

[Bowie Poag <bjp primenet 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!

Right on.  I've been spending way too much time trying to convince 
everyone that i'm not some psychotic dictator hell-bent on dominating the
Style Guide--Time that could have otherwise been spent on construction.
I've switched into the Mountain Dew & Cold Cereal mode to stay up 18-20
hours a day, just to make up for lost time before the Conference on
sunday. 

> 
>     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.
> 

Hehehehe.. I could cry with joy right now. Someone FINALLY sees what i've
been trying for the good part of a week and a half to convey.

Its hard for me to get thse points across to people, because they
haven't been privy to the same experience I've had, working on the other
SG last year. This sort of document, in order to be done correctly--the
way it SHOULD be made, simply cannot be written by 5,000 sets of hands.
The process needs to be -guided-. Open, but controlled. Velvet ropes in a
movie theater, as far as i'm concerned..Simple flow control.


>        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.

Amen. If anything, Tom would be an absolutely killer addition to the
maintainers team. He tends to be a real volcano of good ideas, and has the
momentum the project needs. In a way, I -want- Tom to split off, just to
see what he can come up with, which might be of some use for all of us.
Different approaches to the same problem tend to lift more truth out of
the whole mess than several attempts with identical approaches. 

However..The effort would suffer if suddenly we had two diverging projects
attempting to utilize the same airwaves. The people who are fuelling the
whole process (mailing list folks, the public) are going to become
confused very, very quickly, as to what theyre really contributing for.
Focus quickly fades, and we all sink into a swamp of confusion and
disarray. We can't really afford this. There is, and should continue to
be, one official GNOME UISG Project, which is re-writing 1.0..Not two, or
three, or four. Everyones welcome to participate, and no one will be
ignored.

> 
>     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.

I'd compare the mailing list to the Senate, and the general public which
gathers up at the Conferences as the House of Representatives. From
one hand to the next, up to the top. Bucket-brigade consensus :)

Bowie