Re: [MLUG] Inconsistent Widgets

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One thing that makes Linux unique is that it is very modular. There are no
"OS widgets," as the OS (Linux, FreeBSD) doesn't have much to do with GUI
(though I guess it does hardware accerlation). No one defines the
guidelines, its the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar issue. Rules can easily be
set for the Cathedral (everyone only speak Latin, or everyone only use
Aqua) whereas in the bazaar everyone has their own stand, doing their own
thing. The latter has its advantages (competition, freedom of choice), but
as you note has its disadvantages. Any consistency is purely voluntary.
Since you can't get much more "cathedral" then a Mac (well, not counting
game consoles), I can see how you would take issue with it.

To some extent Redhat is highlighting the issue by putting their favorite
programs in the spotlight with their bluecurve initative, instead of
having, for instance, just KDE app icons on the Panel.

KDE apps have various rules and UI guidelines, and just using the KDE
toolkit imposes quite a few automatically. So KDE is tackling the issue
more or less by creating mostly from scratch any sort of program a desktop
user can want. But indeed they're not always the best programs; KOffice is
still a little rough around the edges in my experience.

QT programs can adjust their look and feel based on the OS its running on
(though they don't have a KDE look and feel ironically).  However its
pretty unique. So, I would guess the answer to your question on how hard
could it be is "fairly hard". People are at least thinking of addressing
the problem though:
"KDE/GNOME To Cooperate On Interface Guidelines" http://dot.kde.org/1044312611/

Wishing we had sledding snow in Kirksville,
Ian Monroe
http://www.monroe.nu

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Bruce Alspaugh wrote:

> So I do a full install of Red Hat 8.0, go into KDE, and check out the
> Bluecurve environment.  It looks nice at first, but then I notice something:
> applications are using different widgets.  Take scroll bars as an example:
> Konquerer has three diagonal grooves on the thumbs of its scroll bars.
> Mozilla has three horizontal grooves on its scroll bar thumbs.  OpenOffice
> Writer doesn't have any grooves at all.  The scroll bars also were slightly
> different shades of grey.  Buttons look different too: Mozilla uses rounded
> corner buttons, while other applications use square corner buttons.  I tried
> using the Theme Manager and discovered some of the applications responded
> well to theme changes, while others did nothing.  Menu bars were of
> different heights and used different fonts.  I haven't experimented as much
> with gnome, but I assume it has similar issues.
>
> As an original Mac programmer going back to 1984, I find the user-interface
> inconsistency bothersome.  Widgets had a very consistent look and feel
> across applications and were supposed to follow extremely strict guidelines.
> Maybe I'm just being too much of a purist, because I have to admit Mac has
> lost a lot of the consistency it had in it's early days.  I won't even go
> into what Java/Swing widgets look like.  My point is not to start a debate
> as to which environment is best, but simply to understand the underlying
> software architecture issues behind these inconsistencies.
>
> Is the inconsistency because the developers are programming to different UI
> libraries that render their widgets differently?  Why aren't the various
> libraries just wrappers for the underlying OS widgets so the OS can define
> the look-and-feel?  How hard is it for developers to code their applications
> so that the widgets will automatically adapt to the user interface
> guidelines and theme settings of their environment, be it KDE, GNOME, IRIX,
> Aqua (now that Apple is making X11 available on OS X), etc.?  Do libraries
> like GTK, Qt, Motif, help or hinder the consistency issue?

I guess they help, since without them everyone would be programming
straight X11, and we certainly wouldn't want that. And they allow the
epossiblity of creating libraries with similar look and feel without have
to fiddle much with the code of current programs.

>Who defines the guidelines anyway?

> Bruce Alspaugh
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