[Usability]Gorilla and North [was Re: toolbar issues]

[David Emory Watson <dwatson cs ucr edu>]

On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 01:04, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> I think what the issue comes down to in my opinion is that nautilus
> might as well be gnome, as it and the panel are the central apps for
> using gnome meaningfully as a desktop environment. Applications that are
> part of the core desktop should honor global gnome settings, including
> toolbars universally...I personally have less of an issue with fifth
> toe/ third party apps disregarding minor settings such as toolbar icons,
> so if galeon decided they still wanted to have themable toolbars i
> wouldn't put up much of a fight, since galeon is not part of the core
> desktop. However galeon developers, choosing to follow the hig and
> increase overall desktop usability, decided that themable toolbars where
> bad and removed them. I think we should follow their lead and go for
> consistency within apps. 

Lets forget about "the grand unified theory of UI design" for a moment
and just focus on one problem:  How do we allow Gorilla and North to do
what they want to do in the optimum way?

> Consistency is what most users want. Have you ever read slashdot? People
> are always complaining about how gnome and kde apps always look
> inconsistent with each other since they don't share a theming mechanism.
> This will probably never be fixed, however it would do alot for gnome to
> have at least all of our apps be consistent with each other.

Problem:

Gorilla and North are two great themes which have chosen to override the
toolbar icons in nautilus.  Because they use the nautilus theme
mechanism instead of the gtk theme mechanism, their custom icons are not
used on a system wide basis.  This creates inter-application consistency
problems.  "Slashdot" doesn't like this...

Solution: 

1) Ask Tigert and Jimmac if they give a shit about "web browser"/"file
manager"/nautilus toolbar icons.  If they say no then we forget about
this entire fiasco, otherwise goto 2).

2) The icon spec. (www.freedesktop.org) and gtk+ already provide the
ability to install system wide icon themes.  It remains to convert
Gorilla and North to use that mechanism when installing their toolbar
icons.  This way, icons are consistent across the entire desktop, but
theme designers can still create "browser" themes if they desire.