On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 17:19 +0000, Calum Benson wrote: > On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 00:07 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote: > > > > If we're going with the new Clearlooks, does that need any sort of > > UI or a11y review? I know that there have been sweeping changes. > > There is a lot more blue. > > Theme changes, even to the default theme, haven't historically come > under the banner of UI reviews, as they generally implement the stuff > that the HIG doesn't talk about because it's expected to "just work". > So unless the new Clearlooks has fundamentally changed the way any > controls look or behave, it's probably just a case of filing regular bug > reports about anything irksome.
Nonetheless, the UI freeze and announcement period are there, at least in part, there for the documentation team. In fact, the announcement period was explicitly requested by me, for the documentation team, a few release cycles back. Changing the look of standard widgets affects every single screenshot in every piece of documentation, core Gnome or otherwise. And that also means every translation of every piece of documentation. That's a lot of pixels. Having said that, we should be extremely careful about how much we change the default look each release cycle. The world doesn't revolve around our release schedule, and we can't expect everybody to retake all their screenshots just because we decided we, for this six months, we'd like some more blue, or a different style of icons. Let's look at Apple. With every release (which are nowhere near as frequent as ours), they have refined the interface. The ribbing got less ribbed, the tones got more subdued. But it was all very gradual. Now, six months ago, we made a radical change in our default look by adopting the old Clearlooks. I'm not criticizing that move. In fact, I believe it was me that made the final decision. It had to be done. If anything, it helped foster consistency. Our old theme was so ugly that all the major vendors changes it. And, of course, they all used their own default theme in their own documentation. And then various other people producing various other software used whatever theme they happened to like. With Clearlooks, we produced something that at least some of the vendors could converge on, meaning the documentation produced by those vendors could look the same. And I'd like to think that that caused some of the independents to do the same thing. So, in that case, a radical change was needed. The ups far outweighed the downs. But that does not mean that radical changes are always good. Every few years, maybe. Every few months, absolutely not. We can make gradual changes, though. But once we've made a stable release, the cat's out of the bag. We can't go back, we must only go forward with what we've got. Right now, we've only put this look into our betas. We can still change it. It will have an impact on people, to be sure, but it can be done. Once we put 2.14.0 out, we're stuck with what we've got. So we better be damn sure we like what we're doing. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
