Re: DnD themes

[Miles Lane <miles amazon com>]

Greetings:

Here are some more thoughts on UI management:

My previous experience with OS/2 was back in the 1.X and 2.0
days, so my rememberence of the desktop attribute management
system may be a bit dated.  That said, I recall that when I 
tried to learn how to configure the desktop, I spent hours
scratching my head before I got it figured out and even then
I found it cumbersome.

Window$ theme management UI is much more limited than that of
Gnome, in that the appearance of UI controls are not as flexible
and restrict theme designers quite a bit.  On the plus side,
Window$ gives you a consistent interface that is easy to use,
once learned.  One of the benefits for users could be argued
the restrictions Window$ places on UI appearance.  The reason 
this is so is that it ensures that naive users find a familiar
environment on all Window$ machines.

Gnome doesn't currently have a desktop configuration UI that
supports some of the look and feel tweaks familiar to Window$
users.  For example, the Gnome desktop UI is all theme driven.
Windows has themes that are collections of colors, fonts, 
positioning information and UI element sizes.  Once a Window$
theme is selected, a user may tweak individual elements of the
theme.  Gnome does not facilitate feature by feature tweaking
in the same way.  Currently, users are constrained by the
choices of the theme designers unless they want to go in and
modify the files that make up the theme (not naive user 
activities).  I have heard that Gnome may enable color and
font modifications in a more Window$-like way in the future
(brightness, saturation, color vector changes on a feature
by feature basis).  This would give users more control and
let theme designers focus on feature shapes, gradients,
layout and so on.

One of the challenges mentioned by Miguel in his recent State 
of the Gnome address was the need to get a bunch of really 
good presets for distributions.  I think this is super 
important, especially for naive Window$ users.  

One of the biggest challenges of bringing Window$ users into 
the Gnome environment will be making it accessible in spite 
of the degree to which it can be customized.  It's scary how 
confused most Window$ users are if you simply move their 
windows around.  Like, "Where did my program go?", when all 
you did was remove a desktop shortcut and so on.

>From a usability perspective for Window$ users, it might be
really very helpful to have a much of the flexibility of
Gnome is locked down and simplified.  This could all be 
unlocked via a single setting.  This setting could even be
set up to be managed by system administrators, so that 
companies who want to pull the Gnome desktop into an 
enterprise can tailor the desktop to be as familiar as 
possible to Window$ users (system administrators love this
kind of sh@t because they are concerned with the cost of
user support).  

Anyhow, I know this is a long and somewhat rambling message.
I hope at least some of it is useful to folks figuring out 
how to make Gnome a desktop that can take on the fallow 
fields of naive users in the Land 'o Bill.

Cheers,
	Miles