Guest post by The Gtk+ team is working on a roadmap to structure the development process of the Gtk+ 3.0 release and to open up the involved decision making progress. The first draft has been sent to the devel mailing list, and is now open for debate. Coincidentally, the draft roadmap also provides a nice overview of the features and changes planned for Gtk+ 3.0.
http://testbit.eu/~timj/blogstuff/GtkRoadmap3Draft2.html
I’d like it to be possible to resize multiple desktop icons at once. I like my main launchers to be large enough to take up one edge of my screen, and I usually have about six or seven on my desktop. It’s a bit of a PITA to have to resize them individually, and hope they’re the same size. What I’d like is to be able to select a few icons at once, right click, resize, and be changing the size of all of them the same way you resize them individually.
You’re thinking the gnome desktop. This is the GTK user interface toolkit.
For GNOME and GTK: How about rather than spending your time on useless animation effects, you work on your *cough* tasPkbAaNrEL and rather then creating icon spaces manually when you re-arrange icons, the space for the icon being dragged is automagically equally created and the rest of the icons are automagically moved ending up with an equal amount of space between each icon…you know, just like Windows
This will make your panel look rather organized. Little things like this do make a difference.
You may also want to pay attention of the amount of space you use in dialog boxes and toolbars. Rather than occupying a quarter of the screen for a simple dialog with a few controls in it, make your controls somehow appear “more neat” and professional and smaller.
Toolbars: Simply compare the toolbars of Word 97 or even Word 95 with GTK’s latest and greatest “AbiWord” and GNumeric.
Edited 2009-04-09 23:41 UTC
GTK+ GUIs look professional exactly because they use white space. Windows 95 and Word 97 come from the old era when monitors were small, so every pixel on the screen was precious. But in the 3rd millenium, crammed GUIs with no spaces from the 90’s era are just awkward and amateurish. Every professional designer knows that you have to add white space to make the elements stand out more and make the UI more comfortable to use. And good-looking, of course.
Besides, this has nothing to do with GTK+. GTK+ by default does not add any white space around its elements (containers, buttons, frames etc.) The white space is added by the application developers and GUI designers, usually following the GNOME HIG, which describes exactly how much white space you should add to dialogs etc. This makes GNOME GUIs look very clean and consistent. The button size is also dictated by its contents (text, icons), plus its packing properties. Again, this has nothing to do with GTK+, which allows you to make windows, buttons etc. as small and ugly as you want. But fortunately, the GNOME developers follow GUI principles designed by UI experts.
I am sorry but I have to disagree with you. You see I think the exact opposite of everything you said. You say using white is professional? May be but everything has limits. Have you ever seen Microsoft and Apple using white space the way GNOME/GTK use it?
But it’s not all about white space. Controls/Widgets in GTK applications have no ecstasy. They look like they are just thrown there without any thought. This is especially relevant to toolbars. When I refer to GNOME over here, I refer to all apps belonging to GNOME and these include AbiWord and GNumeric and all of the developers developing with the GTK. It is *not* all about spaces. It is also about the way the combo boxes, toolbars, buttons etc look. Compare a Windows 95/Windows 7 style combo box with one of GTK^aEURTMs? The GTK one would be almost twice the size in width and height comparing to the Windows one regardless what theme you use. I have not seen *one* descent theme for GTK. (Actually I^aEURTMd be lying. The Redmond 95 is more descent but again needs more work).
You believe AbiWord^aEURTMs look is professional and MS Word is not? I hope you are joking. No offense to you or the GTK developers but if the majority of GTK developers think like what you have said in your post, I have one message for all of you. Good luck to your desktop aspirations.
I feel a bit sorry for Canonical. Ubuntu is such a solid distribution, everything is automated for you, automatic codec download, settings, drivers etc but unfortunately suffers from my ^aEURoeself-proclaimed issues^aEUR.
If GNOME looked and behaved anything like what MS and Apple and even eComStation have done, Ubuntu will take down Windows without a doubt! But the problem is it just does not.
The GNOME panel is not even comparable to the Win 98 taskbar and there is like 10/11 years difference between now and then.
Edited 2009-04-10 06:46 UTC
Widgets are themeable, so if combo box in GTK+ looks too big to you, you you’re using a theme that’s not suitable to you. Again, that’s not GTK+’s fault.
For the white space, one of the suggestions for GTK+ 3.0 is themeable padding. That would probably mean that people who like crammed, crowded GUIs could use a theme with smaller padding.
Widgets in GNOME GUIs are definitely not thrown there without any thought. They are thrown there according to the official GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, which is a very thoughtful piece of work (by far the most professional GUI guidelines in the free software world, comparable perhaps to the Apple Mac OS X HIG).
And I am not talking about Abiword. You either talk about GNOME, GTK+ or Abiword. Those are three completely different things. If Abiword’s GUI is bad, it’s Abiword’s fault. It is perfectly possible to make a toolbar with tiny little icons and buttons in GTK+. The Abiword developers did not make such toolbar. Nothing to do with GTK+.
Edited 2009-04-10 08:26 UTC
Ok well in my own opinion, the widgets of the GNOME’s top panel look quite unprofessional. The positioning of the icons next to “Applications Places System” look like they are out of proportion. This also applies to panel icons when you create a new panel. I just can’t describe it but there is something very dull about it. Let me show you what I mean. Look at this screenshot I found:
http://linuxfud.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/screenshot2006-11-20.pn…
Pay attention to that Konqueror window. Look at its toolbar. Can you see how neat the toolbar icons are as well as the toolbar itself? It’s got borders, separators and the spacing of each icon is equal between each icon. The icons are centered. The text is centered. The top and bottom of the text of the icons is on the middle of the icon. Now look at this screenshot:
http://www.addventures-online.co.uk/assets/images/Ubuntu_Screenshot…
Look at the icons next to the menu bar! It looks like they have been thrown without any thought put into it! I hope people can understand what I mean when I talk about ecstasy! Now don’t get me wrong, I do not favor one DE over another. I could have used a Windows screenshot here. I just wanted to demonstrate ecstasy in design.
Edited 2009-04-10 09:38 UTC
That’s not Konqueror. It’s Swiftfox, a Firefox variant, and it uses GTK+ on Linux. It’s a GTK+ toolbar.
I already saw that but my comment’s Edit button had expired and no, GTK certainly cannot be given for that look – XUL yes, GTK no.
This oppinion of HUGE buttons on GTK is a misleading wording and customs.
Windows (and KDE which tries to resemble it) makes the buttons more compact. I am not gonna argue if is good or not, but when you go to a theme that say: 6 pixels around you text to be blank, and 12 pixels around button to be again blank, you will see around 20 pixels around buttons. Do you know what is the worse? When you go back to Windows: you will see that buttons are not put in the same 12 pixels place, and you will click wrong…
So is a different philosophy. Want to know small toolbar based on GTK? Nokia tablets which use Maemo have small widgets. N770 was first of them.
About big buttons in menus/toolbars in Ubuntu, I’m kinda agree but also I think that is a very good approach: a person with lower skill on pointing a button will hit it more probably than a small button.
Looking ugly on you: don’t use!
One last thing that you’ve got an image about how great/bad are looking are some things to you: you: you use KDE and KDE till KDE 4 HAVE NO HIG, means no standard UI. Fully agree that buttons were smaller, and it can apply even to your GTK applications. But you miss the point: GNOME is mainly an UI for dumb users. I had loved KDE 3 at it’s start, but when I jumped to GNOME, I had found one thing: the UI is invisible to me, I rarely click wrong a menu button or a button, and even I have something really hard to lose: I make a reflex to click OK or Cancel, because of their placing…
Going to Vista for instance, you will hate the day you are there: nothing match! Take for instance: Desktop->Properties and you will see a lot of mess, continue with Control Panel and Media Player, IE and Explorer.
One last thing that you’ve got an image about how great/bad are looking are some things to you: you: you use KDE and KDE till KDE 4 HAVE NO HIG, means no standard UI. Fully agree that buttons were smaller, and it can apply even to your GTK applications. But you miss the point: GNOME is mainly an UI for dumb users. I had loved KDE 3 at it’s start, but when I jumped to GNOME, I had found one thing: the UI is invisible to me, I rarely click wrong a menu button or a button, and even I have something really hard to lose: I make a reflex to click OK or Cancel, because of their placing…
In my opinion it is not about clicking on the wrong button but the appearance of the GUI.
I was hoping it will never come to this but I am going to have to show this:
http://ecomstation.com/gallery/gal/eComStation_2.0/ecs20_screen2.jp… — See that panel/taskbar + toolbars. Not bad at all? Too bad eCS doesn’t run on my hardware.
http://toastytech.com/guis/ecsdfolders.png
Now that’s ecstasy. You see how neat that toolbar is? (the discussion here is GTK and not Linux)
http://ecomstation.com/gallery/gal/OpenOffice_2.0_beta/OOo20_010.pn…
I am not mentioning Windows here delibireately just to show you that someone out there does it right (oops eComStation IS Windows).
http://ecomstation.com/gallery/gal/eComStation_2.0/ecs20_screen5.jp…
Edited 2009-04-10 14:37 UTC
That has nothing to do with any lacking in GTK. The position and icons you are pointing out and are completely configurable. Just because the panel lets you put ugly ass icons on the panel in that way doesn’t mean you have to. You can use another icon set, and space the icons however you want and even add separators. You don’t even need to put any icons there at all if you don’t want to.
And I disagree with you.
I’m typing this post from a Mac because my Linux laptop’s hard drive died. I’ve been using OS X for a while now and everything – buttons, toolbar buttons, text, etc. – is just too damn small. GTK’s spacing is good and I want it back. Just because Apple and MS use small spacing doesn’t mean it’s good.
I’m sorry I have to disagree with your statement “spending your time on useless animation effects” as well. Animation effects are definitely not useless. Although I prefer Linux/GTK over OS X, the animations in OS X are one of the things that OS X does right and that GTK should adopt. Smooth, subtle animations makes the entire UI much more pleasant to work with.
Edited 2009-04-10 10:30 UTC
Sorry, but monitors are still small. Even my 24″ is f*cking small for most of the work I have to do. I hate any waste of screen real estate — silly big fancy buttons, big fluffy Macintosh fonts, MS ribons (especially those), and yes, inefficient toolbars/panels as well.
In other words, you’re a geek.
Nothing wrong with that, but Microsoft, Apple and GNOME developers don’t^A make GUIs for geeks. They make GUIs for 99% of people.
But he’s right. Monitors/screens are small (again). Think of notebooks, netbooks and handheld devices.
Myeah, what he said.
I use two 19″ LCDs now – which is about enough for my desk and seating distance. This gives me 2x 1280×1024.
Looking at my shopping history, the last CRT I bought was in 2001, and that one apparently did 1280×1024 (@ 89 Hz). That was a 4:3 monitor, though, so if I used the more appropriate 1280×960 I’ve gained 6% since then.
Of course, I now have double the number of monitors, but each single app typically stays on one of them: In effect, I don’t have significantly more space to waste.
I had been annoyed with the same thing in Gnome panel. Fortunately, I found the solution: the quicklounge panel applet (aka “Launchers List”). It behaves exactly as the Quick Launch panel in Windows. Launchers automatically reposition themselves when you add or remove them, you can rearrange them using left drag-n-drop, and you can even drag-and-drop launchers onto this applet from Gnome Menu (again, with the left mouse button). Highly recommended!
Hey thanks for that, I will check it out.
I hope that mutliplatformness will become a genuine focus; it needs to be available for Windows and Mac OS X with native look and feel to really get the developers considering it as the swiss army knife of widget to transcend individual platforms.
That doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the road map.
-Ad
Hence the reason for ‘hope’ given that this is a DRAFT roadmap and not a finalised one.
Maybe they lack the man power to do it?
There was a project but I wonder how much of the lack of porting is due to fundamental problems lower down that makes porting more difficult that it needs to be. Maybe rather than porting it to Mac OS X that they make GTK+ easier to port.
Btw, does GTK+ still use XLIB or has it moved to XCB?
Although I am not a fan of GTK/GTK+, but it is good to see GTK+3 is on its way.
Edited 2009-04-10 04:07 UTC
And when they will have implemented all their plans, what will be the reason to choose GTK over Qt for a new project?
I think that if you are addicted on clean interfaces and good documentation: Qt makes the lead at any time, mostly if you like C++ and QMake/CMake build system.
If you will like anyway to paint widgets in Cairo and not in QPainter, which is standard on multiple platforms naturally, you will want to write code from .Net (Mono) or Python, Gtk will remain the main reason to keep it. And if you like Vala language, which resemble C#, and you will wait 1 year to be fixed and have pretty stable IDEs for it, you will have a higher level platform to work with and will reduce a lot your production time also.
So depends on your needs, support and expectancy, Gtk may be or not the best platform to you (combined with a higher level language, not necesarily C or wrapped MM C++)