Re: A call to action

["Michael T. Babcock" <mbabcock fibrespeed net>]

colin z robertson wrote:

> Ok, I think our first task should be the creation of a set of UI
> guidelines much like Mac and KDE have. That's an example of the sort
> of communication that we'll need to make. The fact that this wasn't
> done a year ago is pretty depressing.

Hmmm ... I remember leaving the list about then for a year or so.  Did I miss
anything? ;-)

> Also, it would be easier to keep people on this list if they felt that
> what they were doing was worthwhile, and I think that will come when
> people take more notice of us, and I think that will come when we
> communicate our ideas better.

You know what I think we need?

We need a better home on the web.  Maybe I'm just an ASP who sells that line to
too many people every day, but we GUI people need a site that makes people say
"Yeah, I want them telling me how to do UI design.  They're good!"

We need a site with archives, discussion boards, proposals and counter-proposals.
We need a summary page with information on past threads much like what the Kernel
Traffic (kt.linuxcare.com) maintainer does.

What we need most is to blatantly copy and paste guidelines we've agreed on in the
past instead of just linking to sites that we mostly agree with.  At one point the
UI hall of fame/shame was the most prominent link on the Gnome UI page.  We should
have been copying out the best statements, putting them in <blockquote>'s and
organising the information for newcomers and developers to use.

I've helped on Gnome projects and when I first started writing software for Gnome,
the UI page was one of the first I visited.  It was useless.  I understand
thoroughly why most programs out there look so aweful.  I've been able to have
more of an effect by actually E-mailing the authors with new window layouts for
them than by discussing how it should be done on this list.

A good number of programmers don't want to be designing their UI anyway -- they
just want to work on the functionality.  On the other hand, there are developers
who spend all their time making great UIs for programs they don't know how to
write -- the Gnome UI site has to be a resource for those people to find each
other too.

Excuse my rant ... I'm going to go back to convincing people to stop making all
their software use tabs for things that should be new windows.
--
Michael T. Babcock, C.T.O. FibreSpeed
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock