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. Thinking a bit about the future and the possibility of Inkscape becoming part of GNOME, 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?
Greetings,
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/
It would be great to be part of the GNOME family and PR machine. Also, we have been successful at moving changes up stream and offer GNOME much for the future especially if we abstract our canvas, etc.
If we feel like this is a good direction to move, we should weigh out the options of it more and if yes, then we can start to push.
It would be good if there is a gnome-graphics package that includes gimp, inkscape, ______.
However, it is nice to not rely on gnome specific libraries and so forth right now.
Thoughts?
Jon
On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 07:07, Alan Horkan wrote:
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/
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On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 14:16 -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
However, it is nice to not rely on gnome specific libraries and so forth right now.
Following the GNOME HIG would not mean relying on GNOME specific libraries... would it?
On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, Charles Goodwin wrote:
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 12:37:14 +0000 From: Charles Goodwin <charlie@...342...> To: Inkscape Project inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] GNOME HIG
On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 14:16 -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
However, it is nice to not rely on gnome specific libraries and so forth right now.
Following the GNOME HIG would not mean relying on GNOME specific libraries... would it?
No.
Definately not a requirement.
Besides if and when Inkscape wants to use Gnome specific components like Gnome-Print (which is barely gnome specific anymore) it would very likely be done as a compile time option or an extension plugin, or failing that Inkscape would include any necessary extras not provided by GTK.
Nobody wants to break the crossplatform compatibility of Inkscape, nobody wants to make life particularly difficult for KDE or other non Gnome users who would prefer GTK only versions.
- Alan
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:
It would be great to be part of the GNOME family and PR machine. Also, we have been successful at moving changes up stream and offer GNOME much for the future especially if we abstract our canvas, etc.
If we feel like this is a good direction to move, we should weigh out the options of it more and if yes, then we can start to push.
It would be good if there is a gnome-graphics package that includes gimp, inkscape, ______.
However, it is nice to not rely on gnome specific libraries and so forth right now.
Thoughts?
Jon
With the activity recently going with the Xorg group, I've been wondering if we couldn't tie in well with them. After all, a lot of the lib's we've got coming up in our roadmap (cairo, littlecms, etc.) are actually Xorg things moreso than Gnome.
Bryce
On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 18:15:43 -0700 (PDT) From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Jon Phillips <jon@...235...> Cc: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>, Lucas Vieites <info@...212...>, Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] GNOME HIG
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:
It would be great to be part of the GNOME family and PR machine. Also, we have been successful at moving changes up stream and offer GNOME much for the future especially if we abstract our canvas, etc.
If we feel like this is a good direction to move, we should weigh out the options of it more and if yes, then we can start to push.
It would be good if there is a gnome-graphics package that includes gimp, inkscape, ______.
However, it is nice to not rely on gnome specific libraries and so forth right now.
Thoughts?
Jon
With the activity recently going with the Xorg group, I've been wondering if we couldn't tie in well with them. After all, a lot of the lib's we've got coming up in our roadmap (cairo, littlecms, etc.) are actually Xorg things moreso than Gnome.
You are thinking in terms of what would be most useful to the developers, a graphics or creative suite is a user focussed idea. Idea like the Gnome Desktop or a Graphics Suite are high level groupings and I dont think they in any way preclude working closely with Xorg as well.
I feel I must say again that being part of the Gnome community really does not mean you have to add Gnome specific dependancies or in any way neglect cross platform development.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
Alan Horkan wrote:
However, it is nice to not rely on gnome specific libraries and so forth right now.
Thoughts?
Jon
With the activity recently going with the Xorg group, I've been wondering if we couldn't tie in well with them. After all, a lot of the lib's we've got coming up in our roadmap (cairo, littlecms, etc.) are actually Xorg things moreso than Gnome.
You are thinking in terms of what would be most useful to the developers, a graphics or creative suite is a user focussed idea. Idea like the Gnome Desktop or a Graphics Suite are high level groupings and I dont think they in any way preclude working closely with Xorg as well.
But the developers are users, too! This isn't the usual producer/consumer relationship.
"I oftimes wonder what the vintner buys One half so precious as the goods he sells."
I must say, though, that if HIG earns Inkscape a place in a distro like Fedora or SuSE, it could be worth investigating.
Of course, it would be pleasant if some umbrella group does not try to dictate how Inkscape development proceeds. (historical reference) ;-)
I feel I must say again that being part of the Gnome community really does not mean you have to add Gnome specific dependancies or in any way neglect cross platform development.
Well, some specified UI things do require Gnome code, especially those that coordinate inter-application communication. A good example is something as simple sounding as drag-and-drop, which actually requires a lot from Gnome, and a lot of code from the application.
Bob
On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
You are thinking in terms of what would be most useful to the developers, a graphics or creative suite is a user focussed idea. Idea like the Gnome Desktop or a Graphics Suite are high level groupings and I dont think they in any way preclude working closely with Xorg as well.
I feel I must say again that being part of the Gnome community really does not mean you have to add Gnome specific dependancies or in any way neglect cross platform development.
Hmm, maybe that's true in theory, but that wasn't the sense I got. Seemed like they were mostly interested in getting us to use their libs and making a plugin so to give graphics editing capabilities for the other apps. So other than the libs (which we can use anyway regardless), it wasn't clear what benefit Inkscape would get..
If being part of an office suite is helpful for users, then wouldn't OpenOffice be the suite to join? I dunno, it seems like the best thing for Inkscape is to try to be a good app that'd work okay with whatever suite. If there'd be something specific to gain from joining a suite, great, but if it only means more development expectations... well we've already got a lot to do...
Bryce
On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:24:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] GNOME HIG
On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
You are thinking in terms of what would be most useful to the developers, a graphics or creative suite is a user focussed idea. Idea like the Gnome Desktop or a Graphics Suite are high level groupings and I dont think they in any way preclude working closely with Xorg as well.
I feel I must say again that being part of the Gnome community really does not mean you have to add Gnome specific dependancies or in any way neglect cross platform development.
Hmm, maybe that's true in theory, but that wasn't the sense I got.
Seemed like they were mostly interested in getting us to use their libs and making a plugin so to give graphics editing capabilities for the other apps. So other than the libs (which we can use anyway regardless), it wasn't clear what benefit Inkscape would get..
The benifits for open source developers in technical are not very big, these groupings are mostly about marketing.
The things Gnome Office wants from Inkscape (reuse of libraries, a better vector canvas they can share, etc) are things that are planned for the long term anyway (I'm basing this on the roadmap).
If being part of an office suite is helpful for users,
Given that Gnome-office is very much focussed on Abiword and Gnumeric (and libgda) at the moment would not make sense for Inkscape to be part of Gnome Office.
If Gnome Office were much broader it might make some sense, I mean Microsoft inlcude Visio in some versions of Office. Gnome Office was supposed to be about getting different applications to interoperate and share code but that happend more on a direct app to app basis rather than through Gnome Office specifically bring in new develoepers. Gnome Office provide a concept, a convenient banner, and regular reminder of the need for improved integration more than anything else. Only since OpenOffice came to dominate has Gnome Office refocussed and made moves to better integrate a few apps.
The notion of being part of Gnome Office was just because there was no 'Creative Suite'. Really it makes most sense to have Inkscape and the Gimp work well together.
The whole idea of a Creative Suite is so much about branding and packaging that it is almost meaningless in a linux distribution. If you are selling your software packing all together and offering a bulk discount to keep users on your less popurlar products by leveraging the better ones makes sense. If you have gone to the trouble of integrating things it makes sense to use that to help market your product, but of course when you are not heavily marketing your product it is moot. If you are using something like apt-get it is just be a shorthand for downloading more than one application at once, and if you use a boxed set linux distribution everything is already bundled together.
I realise it is not a big deal.
then wouldn't OpenOffice be the suite to join?
(differnt toolkit, and it already has a Drawing appliction so no)
I dunno, it seems like the best thing for Inkscape is to try to be a good app that'd work okay with whatever suite.
Yeah of course, I guess I've made to much of a minor issue.
My point in brining up Gnome Office is to make sure that thinks like the shared canvas, cut/paste, drag/drop are somewhere on the roadmap and that some consideration is given to sharing standards (gnome-office is looking to have some sort of plugin standard too they just haven't gotten around to it yet either). I just want to make sure the options are considered, if it seems like I'm trying to burden Inkscape with too many short term expections then I apologise for that but I do have big expectations for Inkscape in the long term. I hope to be using Inkscape for years to come.
If there'd be something specific to gain from joining a suite, great, but if it only means more development expectations... well we've already got a lot to do...
I'd best stop distracting you from it, hadn't I ;)
- Alan
On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
Seemed like they were mostly interested in getting us to use their libs and making a plugin so to give graphics editing capabilities for the other apps. So other than the libs (which we can use anyway regardless), it wasn't clear what benefit Inkscape would get..
The benifits for open source developers in technical are not very big, these groupings are mostly about marketing.
Yeah, possibly, although I haven't really gotten a big impression about the marketing approach. Also, we seem to be getting word out about Inkscape at about the "right" pace - not too much, but enough to keep interest and new developers up.
The notion of being part of Gnome Office was just because there was no 'Creative Suite'. Really it makes most sense to have Inkscape and the Gimp work well together.
*Nod* Yeah, you're right, interoperability is important with other applications, and we especially want to be able to communicate well with the other graphics apps. We've been moving in that direction with things like file formats and investigating SVG incompatibilities, so hopefully this'll get a lot of improvements.
The whole idea of a Creative Suite is so much about branding and packaging that it is almost meaningless in a linux distribution. If you are selling your software packing all together and offering a bulk discount to keep users on your less popurlar products by leveraging the better ones makes sense. If you have gone to the trouble of integrating things it makes sense to use that to help market your product, but of course when you are not heavily marketing your product it is moot.
Yeah I think you have a good point - suites make sense from a marketing perspective when you're selling the software, but in our situation most of the apps are included with the linux distro anyway. I'm really more concerned about being excluded just because a given user thinks, "Oh, I'm going to use OpenOffice so I'll unload all these GnomeOffice apps."
I dunno, it seems like the best thing for Inkscape is to try to be a good app that'd work okay with whatever suite.
Yeah of course, I guess I've made to much of a minor issue.
My point in brining up Gnome Office is to make sure that thinks like the shared canvas, cut/paste, drag/drop are somewhere on the roadmap and that some consideration is given to sharing standards (gnome-office is looking to have some sort of plugin standard too they just haven't gotten around to it yet either).
Yeah you're right, we do need to put attention to that. I'd actually like to see if there's a lower level set of standards to connect to... It'd be great if we could do these things in a way that's not Gnome specific but that would work equally well in KDE or generic X environments.
Bryce
On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 13:06, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Yeah, possibly, although I haven't really gotten a big impression about the marketing approach. Also, we seem to be getting word out about Inkscape at about the "right" pace - not too much, but enough to keep interest and new developers up.
Yes. You're doing all the right things are many people are very impressed.
The notion of being part of Gnome Office was just because there was no 'Creative Suite'. Really it makes most sense to have Inkscape and the Gimp work well together.
*Nod* Yeah, you're right, interoperability is important with other applications, and we especially want to be able to communicate well with the other graphics apps. We've been moving in that direction with things like file formats and investigating SVG incompatibilities, so hopefully this'll get a lot of improvements.
The whole idea of a Creative Suite is so much about branding and packaging that it is almost meaningless in a linux distribution. If you are selling your software packing all together and offering a bulk discount to keep users on your less popurlar products by leveraging the better ones makes sense. If you have gone to the trouble of integrating things it makes sense to use that to help market your product, but of course when you are not heavily marketing your product it is moot.
Yeah I think you have a good point - suites make sense from a marketing perspective when you're selling the software, but in our situation most of the apps are included with the linux distro anyway. I'm really more concerned about being excluded just because a given user thinks, "Oh, I'm going to use OpenOffice so I'll unload all these GnomeOffice apps."
MS Word and Open Office both have integrated drawing capabilities for their documents.
I have ideas on how inkscape and librsvg could be used to achieve even more powerful capabilities. (I'm not talking about forking or even putting in much in the way of feature requests except as outlined below. Just using it as you guys improve it.)
SVG lies right in the middle of our post GNOME-Office 1.2 roadmap.
gnome-print already provides an SVG backend that will distributed as part of the GNOME 2.8 release. So every app that uses gnome-print can produce SVG post GNOME-2.8
You should expect a flood of requests to import the SVG it produces :-)
I dunno, it seems like the best thing for Inkscape is to try to be a good app that'd work okay with whatever suite.
Yeah of course, I guess I've made to much of a minor issue.
My point in brining up Gnome Office is to make sure that thinks like the shared canvas, cut/paste, drag/drop are somewhere on the roadmap and that some consideration is given to sharing standards (gnome-office is looking to have some sort of plugin standard too they just haven't gotten around to it yet either).
Yeah you're right, we do need to put attention to that. I'd actually like to see if there's a lower level set of standards to connect to... It'd be great if we could do these things in a way that's not Gnome specific but that would work equally well in KDE or generic X environments.
I suggest you look at drag'n drop and copy & paste if you haven't already. GNOME and KDE have agreed on the former and the X11 mechanism is well documented. AbiWord will happily import any SVG you put on the clipboard now (albeit by converting it to a png) but in Abi 2.4 we plan to keep it as SVG and to make lots of SVG available for pasting.
Cheers
Martin
My point in brining up Gnome Office is to make sure that thinks like the shared canvas, cut/paste, drag/drop are somewhere on the roadmap and that some consideration is given to sharing standards (gnome-office is looking to have some sort of plugin standard too they just haven't gotten around to it yet either).
I too prefer things to be done in a standardised way that benefits both Gnome and KDE (and even other platforms) but at the same time it is good to also have the option of building with extra features like gnome-print or gnome-vfs (still hoping a cross desktop abstraction for gnome-vfs will come along).
I have given it a little bit more thought and tried to think what parts of Gnome Office would most likely to be useful to Inkscape.
The graphing and plotting support in Gnumeric might be useful to Inkscape (I mentioned this before and showed some screenshots of how Adobe Illustrator does plots and graphs but I suspect I neglected to file a feature request).
At the moment work is being done to add GtkMathView support to Abiword, when that work is done it might serve as a useful example if/when Inkscape decides to add support for displaying mathematics.
Martin mentioned the SVG backend to Gnome-Print, if anything I should try and build from CVS and start testing the SVG against Inkscape.
These are of course long term ideas to keep in mind but again I dont want to add unnecessary pressure on more important shorter term goals.
Later
Alan
Alan Horkan wrote:
On Fri, 30 Jul 2004, Lucas Vieites wrote:
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).
I've made use of inkscape on 4 different platforms so far. None of which were using a GNOME desktop (KDE, win32, etc); I'm sure there are many other non-gnome users. I wouldn't want to see *too* much gnome personality. There is a lot of general good sense collected in the gnome HIG though, always worth reading.
John
participants (8)
-
Alan Horkan -
Bob Jamison -
Bryce Harrington -
Charles Goodwin -
John Pybus -
Jon Phillips -
Lucas Vieites -
Martin Sevior