[ Whoops! I left this one out of yesterday's barrage. ] Another strength of our XP efforts is that we've managed to create a user interface that looks strikingly similar on each platform, while still honoring any relevant platform-specific GUI conventions. This means that users on any single platform get a totally native look and feel, but if they wind up switching to a different platform, AbiWord will still look *very* familiar. In many places, this is a direct result of our emphasis of implementing as much functionality as practical in XP code, but in the case of dialogs, it's just plain hard work. One policy that helps reduce the amount of work needed is to *ensure* that all checkins of user-visible changes to the UI also include the corresponding screen shots: http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0119.html http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0143.html In short, it's *much* easier to make each of the platform-specific implementations look similar if we each take the effort to show off what our own platform looks like! For more information on the abi/shots directory, see: http://www.abisource.com/lxr/source/abi/shots/README.TXT If people are willing to take the little bit of extra effort to do a screen grab to show off their work as soon as they're done with it, then we'll always have a complete browseable copy of the current UI for all our platforms. [1] Any objections? Paul [1] When I put my evangelist hat on, this same content seems like it could be put to *really* good use on our website: http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/February/0247.html Even small steps like this could do a *lot* to make the site more user-friendly.
