Ubuntu beyond GTK apps?

[Fergal Daly]

2008/5/16 A. Walton <awalton at gnome.org>:
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Kai Schroeder <schroed at cs.uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>> Conrad Knauer wrote:
>> In my opinion Gnome has to change the HIG first. Although I really like
>> the way affirmative actions are described with a verb instead of just
>> "OK" it was not a good move to place the affirmative action on the right
>> side of a dialog.
> [snip]
>
> Whether or not you agree with it, it's been written in the HIG for
> years and years, and it's the natural layout for long-time GNOME users
> (and Mac OS X users for that matter). Changing this at such a late
> point is just going to trigger an immense amount of frustration (I
> imagine it'd be like waking up and noticing your mouse axes flipped
> and your buttons were mapped the opposite direction). So no, the HIG
> does not need to change in this aspect.
>
> Instead, for those who actually care about this (read: pedants,
> KDE/Windows users), there's gtk_dialog_set_alternative_button_order()

I find this "pedants, KDE/Windows users" interesting. I just gave an
old laptop with xubuntu to my 12 year-old niece, she is neither a
pedant nor a "KDE user" nor much of a Windows user. She is going to
want to use whatever software works, whether it's kitchscratch,
gitchscratch or xitchscratch. She might notice one day that "OK" keeps
changing from left-side to right-side and complain about Linux being a
pain or it might just remain a subconscious annoyance, either way,
it's a pain.

Apart from a fairly small number of developers, documenters and
fan-boys, I suspect there are very few conscious "KDE users" or "Gnome
users". I certainly am not. I use KDE's window manager and task bar
because a long time ago I configured it the way I like. Maybe Gnome
can do exactly the same now, I don't care, my grass is too long and my
daughter wants to play on the see-saw, I'm not switching desktops this
week.

The %age of Ubuntu users who you can label as consciously being
"$WIDGETSET users" shrinks as Ubuntu becomes more popular ("windows
user" being the exception) so making any choices or policy based on
such labelling does not seem in the interests of the majority of
users.

If there is a way that the average user can have

1 consistent UI
2 widest choice of applications
3 no need to choose which camp they belong to

then that should probably be the default and let those who want to
follow the One True Widget Set, twiddle with their .rc files or avoid
that program because it begins with the wrong first letter.

It seems from the paragraph below that there is a way - there just
needs to be a flame war to decide which one to twiddle by default for
those who don't care,

F

> which has been around since GTK+ 2.6 (sometime 2k4). And with a small
> change to your .gtkrc file, you can have your cake and eat it too. And
> you can file bugs against applications that don't use this function
> with their dialogs and applications that violate the HIG (which is
> probably a sizable number, but since the people who presumably care
> about it don't speak up to developers...). I understand Qt has a
> similar ability for GNOME and Mac OS X support, but I've never had a
> want or need to look into it so I'm not sure what it is or how to use
> it.
>
> -A.Walton
>
>>
>> Kai Schroeder
>>
>> --
>> Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list
>> Ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
>>
>
> --
> Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list
> Ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
>