On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Lucas Vieites wrote:
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:48:41 +0200 From: Lucas Vieites <info@...212...> To: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] GNOME HIG
Hi all, I just read about the new release of the GNOME HIG (Human interface guidelines) 2 and suddenly I asked myself if Inkscape was taking these into consideration. I browsed the mailing list a bit and found some postings mentioning them.
When Inkscape was getting started a willingness to do things the Gnome way was expressed, I believe that still exists. I have occassionally tried to nudge things in that direction and there are some feature requests that mention the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines). There was some agreement with the sentiment of "do it like Adobe Illustrator or do it better".
There is certainly a lot that could be done when it comes to dialog layout, and a careful balance needs to be made between following the HIG for transient dialogs but also knowing when to go for tight compact layout for items that are intended to be left showing most of time. The adapted version of the guidelines as used by the GPE (Gnome Palmtop Enviroment) might be useful for this kind of compact layout. http://www.handhelds.org/z/wiki/GpeHIG
Note also that I said 'most of the time', the Gimp regularly assumes that users will leave the Layers palette open and it is extremely difficult if you want to save space and work without it open (they even hide things in a context menu, accessible only from the layers dialog).
Thinking a bit about the future and the possibility of Inkscape becoming part of GNOME,
It seems unlikely that Inkscape would be directly part of Gnome core and it doesn't exactly fit into Gnome-Office and a Gnome-Graphics Suite does not exist yet.
For Inkscape to be informally a part of Gnome - which I already think it is - all that is needed is the desire to be part Gnome, a willingness to follow the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (even if that means occassionaly making minor sacrifices for greater consistancy within the desktop as a whole) and wanting to work with other projects and reuse standard technologies (the current move to Pango being a good example).
or even if this is not on the roadmap, I think these guidelines are a "good thing". So, are the developers using these guidelines as they design the user interface? What do you think about them?
The Guidelines are of course just guidelines and as Inkscape is really moving forward and doing new things I seriously believe the developers will have influence if they make clear and constructive complaints or ask for explanations if the HIG seems inappropriate (or where standard widgets like file dialog are causing problems).
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/