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Open-HCI Announced

Submitted by stro on Sun, 2003-02-02 15:14. Usability

Aaron J. Seigo of the KDE project announces:

Seth Nickell (GNOME Usability Project), Havoc Pennington (Free Desktop,
GNOME), and JP Schnapper-Casteras (Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group)
and myself have been discussing the possibility of co-locating the KDE and
GNOME Human Interface Guides (HIGs).
The plan as discussed thus far is to have the two documents co-inhabit one XML
document. Within this document, each HIG will have its own sections as
appropriate and will remain available for separate viewing. The goal is to
have one URL (on www.FreeDesktop.org) and one document for developers to go
to for KDE and GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. We hope this site can
eventually house guidelines for multiple desktops and graphical toolkits.

The easier we can make it for developers to discover and follow such
guidelines the better it will be for Open Source desktops in general. Since
KDE apps are often run on GNOME and vice versa, developers should be able to
easily reference the guidelines for all the desktops they expect their app to
be run on.

Having a shared document will also allow us to start looking at commonalities
between the documents and perhaps create common chapters or sections on basic
guidelines and lessons that are desktop and toolkit-independent (e.g.,
accessibility and internationalization tips, general usability principles).

It will take some work to merge the documents, create a web site, and raise
awareness about the site for developers and people working on other non-KDE
non-GNOME HIGs. If you wish to join us in these efforts, please subscribe to
the open-hci@freedesktop.org email list via the web interface at:

https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hci/

Best wishes to everyone!

- --
Aaron J. Seigo

Original Announcements
KDE Usability Lists
GNOME Usability Lists

While we're at it :-)

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2003-02-02 19:29.

I think the HIG is a good and important document -- at the very least, it has done very good things to GNOME 2. (Heh, I can remember bothering people about the HIG somewhere around 1.2, when it was no more than a forgotten XML skeleton hiding out in a corner on GNOME CVS.)

What I especially like, is that it is acknowledged in the HIG that the Preferences menu item is completely in the wrong place, but that it's left there nevertheless (good old Dutch "poldermodel" at work here???)

Anyway, I've always wanted to rant about the Preferences menu item, so I see my opportunity here :-)

The Edit menu is for items that have to do with editing a document. Undo/ redo, clipboard, selections, (searching), that kind of stuff. Putting Preferences in the Edit menu is a language thing; "Edit preferences" makes a nice English sentence. But it doesn't make any logical sense, because editing the application preferences is not a document operation, which you'd expect in the Edit menu.

Anyway, I know, the whole world expects it there, and there isn't any other good place for a Preferences menu item. Yet. Luckily, Mac OS X has solved this problem by providing an Application menu, normally carrying the name of the app itself as the menu name. It provides functionality like quitting the app (vs. closing the document, which is in the File menu, right next to the Application menu), Info and Preferences. (I believe the Help is put there as well.) The idea of having a menu to do Application related stuff in seems very, very logical to me.

I think this solution is the only fully aesthetically clean one. Now I don't expect people to go change anything because of this, if only because it seems to require some further integration that I don't see coming anytime sooner or later for GNOME (such as this Apple "menu on top of screen" thingy), but I think it should at least be noted that there is an aesthetical solution for this problem, that wouldn't harm computer users if it became popular.

P. the S.: if you think my rant is really *really* silly, well, that's just because you've got used to this "Edit preferences" thing. But it has always annoyed me that there isn't a single place to look for stuff like preferences, which are usually the first things you look for when opening a program for the first time.

You can compare the annoyance to sitting behind a Mac OS X machine and finding out that there are no Alt shortcuts for the menu's, and you have to use the mouse or memorize all the Ctrl key combinations instead.

As you see, nobody's perfect. But I think the reason why GNOME has survived towards 2.0 is that it acknowledged most of its earlier shortcomings, and be realistic (but radical!) in what to do about them. I just wanted to keep that traditon up.

B. the W., another silly thing I wonder, is when people will ever assign the Windows key (or Ctrl + Esc) to the GNOME App menu by default. People have gotten conditioned to this on Windows computers, and now they will have to be conditioned all over again when they switch to GNOME. Drooling dogs and Pavlov bells. This can't be right!

Bye,

Pflipp

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