Re: RFC: UI design

[Jan Jokela <janjokela gmail com>]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Jan Jokela <janjokela gmail com> wrote:
> Hej, great read!
>
> Regarding your point on Application design & theming for different form
> factors, I think there isn't any logic in even attempting the same user
> interface design (not talking about theming here) for lets say, desktops and
> tablets.
>

I'll leave this standing with a mention of "gnome-shell" and let you
figure out if that application is targeted at desktops or tablets.

I was referring to GTK+ applications. Even if you design a simple GTK+ application, theme it really nicely and try to make it similar in elements and layout to what you might see in WebOS or iOS the end result will simply be sub-par by a big margin. "gnome-shell" is a completely different beast and its fitness for use in a tablet is quite another debate :)

 

> It's most likely true that from the moment applications are given a great
> deal of freedom to style, we cannot have platform themes, because even if we
> have standard widget styling across themes, changing a theme may completely
> distort the desired look for a style. This may require that each platform
> has a fixed theme, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.
>

So what I'm reading out of this is that you are proposing to more or
less remove the ability to change the theme of GTK, because as pointed
out elsewhere, styling applications with an undefined system theme is
very hard.
What this however also means is that a styled application is more or
less tied to the visual design of the platform it is aiming for. So
Ubuntu, Fedora or XFCE could no longer ship a theme different from
upstream GNOME - or maybe even upstream GNOME, Fedora or XFCE could no
longer ship a theme different from Ubuntu - because a different visual
design would make applications look out of place. And what it would
also mean is that the default style of GTK would be way harder to
change, because application would start to depend on the fact that
treeview headers are white (and not light gray or greenishly tinted)
because that would break their design. And we would need to change our
themes with way more care.

Not that Ubuntu, upstream GNOME and Fedora couldn't ship default Apps with their own base style (not theme). But yes that's basically it. That's the only way I see we can achieve platform consistency while giving App developers the possibility to create really outstanding and iconic applications, which is something we don't have at the moment. 

The way I see this issue is that OS X applications are all across the board much superior to GTK+ Apps both from an aesthetic and user experience point of view. And any solution that doesn't really solve the problem is a bad solution.

Jan.

 

Benjamin