Re: one question and one proposal

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 16 Jun 1998, Tom Vogt wrote:
> 
> I heard that the "light beacon" stuff has found its way into the gnome cvs.
> is there any code about this in the 0.20 release? are there any apps
> currently that use this? what is the general status?
>

There's a lamp widget but no apps use it.
 
> I have had a small discussion with a professional screen designer about this
> (and other) topics and I have done a bit of research myself. if anyone is
> even interested in making changes like this, I'd be glad to join that team,
> and yes, interface decisions should always be a team effort.
> 

In my view, something like this is needed to have a productive UI team:

- style guide in CVS, with bug reports filed on it when a programmer is
  unsure what their program should do. Then a decision is reached.
- a way to reach decisions: dictator or democracy, but someone has to 
  say "flame war over, this is how it is"
- style guide is written in terms of practical implementation details. 
  e.g., "Use GnomeApp," whenever possible
- style guide has a "checklist" feel so programs can be checked against  
  it
- there has to be someone going over Gnome apps and fixing small style 
  screwups on a regular basis, and/or filing bugs on apps which violate
  the style guidelines.


A team endlessly discussing exciting new UI ideas or where the dialog
buttons should be is utterly useless. What's needed is someone to do the
tedious and boring job of getting all the File menus in the same order,
making all the apps use the same accelerators for the same things, porting
apps to use widgets like GnomeApp and GnomeDialog, etc. There should be a
maintained style guide with clear checklist-style criteria, and it should
be considered a bug if apps do not follow the guide.

In short, down-to-earth programmers willing to do the dirty work would be
tremendously helpful here. Long discussions on gnome-list are extremely
unhelpful. Doing this right might involve some charitable company hiring a
hacker, since it isn't something volunteers will jump at.

I don't know which kind of team you had in mind, but that's my input on
which you should have had in mind. ;-) 

Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp