On Fri, 5 May 2006, Ben Fowler wrote:
Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 11:39:14 +0100 From: Ben Fowler <ben.the.mole@...400...> To: Inkscape Devel List Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] [SoC] Native OSX GUI ?
On 05/05/06, Timothée Anglade <timothee.anglade@...1261...> wrote:
I'm pondering the idea of doing this kind of work on GTK+OSX with the MacLibre/WinLibre project ...
Do you have the relevant link to the MacLibre project concerned.
Although, I must say this kind of work may be way over my head. I feel perfectly capable of doing UI design [ snip good stuff] ..
I point I neglected to discuss last night was to stress that the ultimate success of the Inkscape project, and no doubt an area of interest to most people here is the quality of the User Interface. In
I'm not an expert on the Mac Human Interface Guidelines but I'd like to think they are a stricter superset of the Gnome Human Interface guidelines and that if enough people wanted to Inkscape should be able to meet those high standards on all platforms not just Mac OS.
my opinion, no effort should be spared in creating an appropriate and high quality HCI.
It is interesting you mention "appropriate" since usability is a lot like optimisation and it depends what you consider most appropriate to optimise for. We have disagreements all the time trying to strike a balance between effiency and learnability. There is no one single right answer, at least not until you strictly tie down the question and know exactly what audience you are trying to target.
It has yet to be shown that an OSS project can produce a best of breed UI (I think that it is possible, and that to date, no project has put together all the ingredients needed for success), which is why one suggestion of mine was to achieve a purity of design, and perhaps work alone for a period of time.
Purity of design or inconsistent and more difficult to learn?
As with the more techincal discussions - such as the shared understanding that native GTK for Mac OS X is the only practial way to go - things go more smoothly when a consensus builds and we all pull together. At the moment there is a rough sense of how we all want to Inkscape to have a better/best user interface possible but a clearer vision of how we can all achieve that together would help. Anything which could help us all form a clearer plan and then break that up into smaller shared tasks will really help. Management is an important part of development, something which I think has been a key part of the success of Inkscape so far.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/