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  KDE/GNOME To Cooperate On Interface Guidelines
Desktop Environment Posted by Aaron J. Seigo on Monday 03/Feb/2003, @14:50
from the whistle-while-you-work dept.
As recently announced, an effort has been started for closer cooperation between the KDE and GNOME usability teams. The effort was announced in a message sent to the open-hci@freedesktop.org mailinglist that was created for this purpose.

Original announcement by Aaron J. Seigo:

Seth Nickell (GNOME Usability Project), Havoc Pennington (Free Desktop, GNOME), and JP Schnapper-Casteras (Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group) and myself have been discussing the possibility of co-locating the KDE and GNOME Human Interface Guides (HIGs).

The plan as discussed thus far is to have the two documents co-inhabit one XML document. Within this document, each HIG will have its own sections as appropriate and will remain available for separate viewing. The goal is to have one URL (on www.FreeDesktop.org) and one document for developers to go to for KDE and GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. We hope this site can eventually house guidelines for multiple desktops and graphical toolkits.

The easier we can make it for developers to discover and follow such guidelines the better it will be for Open Source desktops in general. Since KDE apps are often run on GNOME and vice versa, developers should be able to easily reference the guidelines for all the desktops they expect their app to be run on.

Having a shared document will also allow us to start looking at commonalities between the documents and perhaps create common chapters or sections on basic guidelines and lessons that are desktop and toolkit-independent (e.g., accessibility and internationalization tips, general usability principles).

It will take some work to merge the documents, create a web site, and raise awareness about the site for developers and people working on other non-KDE non-GNOME HIGs. If you wish to join us in these efforts, please subscribe to the open-hci@freedesktop.org email list via the web interface at:

https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hci/

Best wishes to everyone!



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
i hope...
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @04:52
... we start to see collaboration before releasing something, not not vice-versa as happens today.
A common menu hierachy should have be made sinse kde and gnome 1.0, but here we are...
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Nice stuff
by Chakie on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @04:53
This is good news and just highlights the mutual respect the KDE and GNOME developers share for each other. After news like this the "desktop war" doesn't seem as serious anymore. :)
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How times have chaged
by Mr Magoo on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @05:16
Interesting isn't it? When Gnome had the developmental momentum and KDE was rather lagging, there was no interest in cooperation, instead the "Gnome camp" spent a great deal of time flaming KDE and QT. Now KDE is develomentally ahead of Gnome(by a very considerable margin)they want to play nice.
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Button order
by Aurélien Gâteau on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @05:25
I guess there will be quite a lot of discussion regarding button order (Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok)...
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GNOE & KDE
by silversun on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @05:37
I just hope this development will be accepted in both communities. I is a Good Thing to have the choice between two desktops. but it's a bad thing if the choice of desktop rules the choice of applications. The ultimate goal would be component embedding between GNOME, KDE, and other Apps. Can we have gnumeric shets in OpenOffice text documents in KPresenter presentations, please?

Cheers
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So...
by Navindra Umanee on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @07:33
Does this mean KDE will adopt double-clicking or that GNOME will adopt single-clicking?

Does it mean that KDE will switch around the button ordering on the dialog box or that GNOME will?

Really, I'm curious... How will those sorts of issues be resolved exactly? It would really suck for KDE to change its default behaviour... :-)
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huzzah
by Aaron J. Seigo on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @11:37
it's really encouraging to see the acceptance of this project here, on the GNOME discussion boards and even more importantly on the open-hci list itself.

it is very nice when people like Moritz, Waldo, Navindra, etc... understand what people are trying to accomplish. i was very disheartened by the noise on slashdot (we're trying to get a correction statement posted by them, btw), but when it comes to those actually involved it is very, very encouraging!

for everyone who is excited about this, please don't expect results immediately. give the project time to find its feet and actually get some work done. usability related discoveries are VERY slow going in my experience, often orders of magnitude slower than the actual coding required.
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Is this a good idea at all?
by Richard Moore on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @11:39
There have been enough problems with bad communication between the HCI people (some of whom have a clue, and some of whom...) and the developers. Do we really want to compound it by adding in a whole new bunch of HCI people who know nothing about the framework they're talking about? There are certainly areas where cooperation will help, but don't think this is cost-free exercise. It should be noted that I have seen similar problems in the communication between the Gnome HCI team and the Gnome developers, so it is by no means unique to KDE.

Another major issue, is avoiding designing a set of guidelines that simply lead to the lowest common denominator. This would be stupid as they would simply be ignored.

On balance, I tend to think this has the potential to be an unmitigated disaster. I hope to be proved wrong, but I have a lot of doubts.

Rich.
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Where have I heard this before?
by anonymous on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @11:49
Have we not heard this before ?.....past attempts at co-operation haven't lead to anything significant for the end-user what'll make this one any different ?
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File Chooser Dialog
by TomL on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @12:04
The File Chooser Dialog is my favorite part of KDE, silly as
that sounds. So my hope is that GNOME will do something
about their awful dialog and learn from KDE what a user friendly
dialog looks like.
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Button Labels
by Nathan Myers on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @12:53
I hope that the guidelines and the code will say the same
thing, and that the guidelines will not degrade any further.

For example, the Apple UI guidelines make it very clear that
dialog box buttons should not say "yes" and "no", if
possible, but should instead contain descriptive verbs,
e.g. "save", "discard".

When last I checked the Gnome guidelines, it was hard to get
that interpretation. Some Gnome developers have claimed that
the guidelines actually forbid descriptive verbs on buttons,
while others say that any conflicts between the Apple and Gnome
guidelines are bugs in the Gnome document. I haven't read the
KDE guidelines.

This isn't academic; in the version of Evolution I use,
you have to read carefully to figure out whether a message
being composed will be discarded or saved. Gnumeric behaves
similarly. Did the KDE guidelines get this right?
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Experience from a KDE newbie
by Anon on Tuesday 04/Feb/2003, @15:27
Hi, I have been using KDE for a couple weeks now from the introduction of my nerdular boyfriend so I think I can offer a fresh perspective. I normally use windows, so I chose the windows settings from the "Desktop Settings Wizard."

First impression: KDE looks pretty. I especially like the long round circular things at the top of every program that says what it is.

Second impression: Icons and menus are confusing to me.

Very few of the icons make sense to me. I clicked on the little pencil/paper icon that looks like its on a book, and it minimizes everything and shows the background. Doh!, that's the "show desktop" operation, says a little tooltip later. (Great, now I can move the mouse over the other ones to see what they are.)

The icon for a "shell" doesn't convey to much to me. Actually, I thought the shell might be some french fries at first. :) The weirdly tilted E for email seems odd to me. The web browser button looked like some kinda gear on a planet to me also -- was later told that maybe its some ship steering-wheel thingy to mean "navigation." Maybe I'm just strange and my brain is trained for windows, but I'd think these could be better.

The help button as a life-preserver is OK though. But the actual help is a bit..overwhelming. And the start menu or whatever you guys call it.. oh my god! There is so much stuff in there, and everything is named Kthis and Kthat, Kblahblahblah. The only thing I like is that whatever I ran last it gets put up at the top, so I can start it right away when logging in next time.

Also, cut/copy/paste does not always work between all KDE programs. Sometimes only CTRL+C will work and other times CTRL+INS will work and not the other. Argh! (I checked that they were set in Control Center too.) My windows key also does not do anything, or any of my internet buttons and this keyboard is like 3-4 years old.

I see some people arguing about button order and dialog stuff. Whats the big deal? I'm not a programmer, but can't you just make that a setting in the Desktop Wizard Settings program?

One thing that bugs me with dialogs is that when they give you the choice between, say, "Yes," "No," "Cancel," you cannot just press one of the keys they underline as you can in windows. In windows I could just press Y or N or C to do any of the above. I also think when the application asks me "Do you want to save it?" The answer that comes to me is Yes or No. I don't think Discard. Discard what? Discard this dialog? Discard my typing? Huh? The same thing goes for Cancel, which is in windows too but it never made sense to me either.
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Very Encouraging
by Grumpy on Wednesday 05/Feb/2003, @06:01
This is excellent news. The GNOME usability team has done a very good job at creating a professional usability culture for GNOME from which KDE can only benefit.
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A word to KDE
by Michael Staggs on Wednesday 05/Feb/2003, @12:58
Please...I understand that this is possibly so people won't be confused switching from desktop to desktop, applications will look more native no matter what desktop environment you use, etc....but I have been using KDE for a LONG time...1.0 or before. I just checked out the gnome 2.2 screenshots and IN MY OPINION (notice that before you flame) Gnome is just plain ugly. I've never liked the way gnome looks.

So, while you work in this venture PLEASE PLEASE do not change the look of KDE. There are many of us totally satisfied with the way KDE looks and I don't want to see it become just another gnome.

Thank you.
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Summary
by Anonymous Monkey on Friday 07/Feb/2003, @08:08
About Button order, double click, etc:

Could this not be a documented divergence between the desktops? Better yet, it would be nice if GNOME apps running in KDE would use KDE button ordering and single clicking (configurable of course), and KDE apps used GNOME button order and double click in GNOME.

About file dialog boxes:

Yes KDE has a nice one, yes GNOME knows theirs is not, yes theirs will be better when the new GTK comes out. No need to flame the GNOME people on this one or overly flatter ourselves with how nice the KDE one is.

Compoment embedding:

I like the suggestion that embedding kspread and gnumeric in OO should be a feature. I think that having a common file format between Abiword, KOffice and OpenOffice would be more valuable for this though. You could use any spreadsheet app to make a spreadsheet readable and embedable by OpenOffice this way. I know there was discussion going on between the different office suite developers about maybe moving towards the OpenOffice file format, but I don't know how much development is happening there.

I'd still like to see the ability to embed any X application inside another though, so that we could have KDE and GNOME software as plugins to Mozilla, as well as GNOME and KDE stuff embedding in one another. I'm not sure how possible any of this is and how much work if any has been done. (Didn't there used to be a way to make any X application a KPart?)

Everything else:

Sadly much of the rest of the discussion is dwelling on past communication problems and arguments between KDE and GNOME or between HCI and the desktop developers. Flaming GNOME or the HCI guys accomplished nothing. Not moving forward because the past isn't rosey doesn't get you anywhere. I say we should wish this new initiative good luck and be as helpful as possible. Cooperation between GNOME and KDE (and maybe/hopefully Apple someday too) on usability is a good idea.
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Standardized TTFs?
by PRR on Sunday 09/Feb/2003, @08:27
A few weeks back the folks at Bitstream were kind enough to make their Vera truetype fonts available for use to the Gnome Foundation in Linux/Open-source Distros. I would assume KDE can use them too.

Would it be plausible to make Bitstream Vera the default (truetype) font for KDE/Gnome? They look much nicer at "typical" resolutions (1024x768 or so) than the Adobe fonts that are usually packaged. Myself, I have no problem copying over the TTFs from my Win partition and doing the ttmkfont trick, but many Linux newbies don't know this, and it would be helpful for them to have good-looking TTF's right away. Just a suggestion.
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Excellent
by EUtopian on Sunday 09/Feb/2003, @13:38
This is wonderful news, and not a day too early. Thanks for your contributions on this very important subject.
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KDE and Gnome usability
by Pedro Amaral Couto on Saturday 01/Oct/2005, @06:20
I think it would be great if KDE, Gnome and other desktops, window managers, or what ever, agreed with the same file formats and some general guidelines. I don't think we should agree on everything, but we should have good sense and some agreement on important things, as usability is concerned. Defining what are those important things should be the first task.

Anyway, deciding common formats should be very important ( themes, for instance ) - it's very annoying to see very small letters and a radically different theme when using a KDE applications on Gnome environment, and vice-versa.

Fanatics never admit they are fanatic; they only say what they believe, and close their ears and eyes when we say something not pleasant to them. That way their protected ideas will soon or later stagnat and die, while others learn from mistakes. That said, don't flame; flame won't help anyone. If you think you have a better ideas, tell them and listen and learn from others; if everyone do this, KDE, Gnome and everything else would be better.

Regards;
pedroac.
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