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(a)lists.sourceforge.net&gt; > 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/ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel

Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 12:37:14 +0000 From: Charles Goodwin <charlie@...342...> To: Inkscape Project <inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net&gt; 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?

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(a)lists.sourceforge.net&gt; 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.

> 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 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.

> 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).

> 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).