>
> > I would say a more sane approach is that application settings should
> > override  theme defaults. I know the gnome guys have this thing about
> > deciding how  every human being on the planet ought to think but surely
> > they didn't make it  impossible to do this ? Did they ?
>
> The gnome guys think, that fonts and themes should be controlled by the
> user, i.e. every human being on the planet, not by the application, i.e.
> programmer.
>
Oh I've heard their arguments, I even agree with them. It's their METHODS I 
don't approve off.
I think they go about their goal of consistency in completely the wrong way 
and fail exactly at what they set out to do - controll by the user. Where KDE 
gets it right is letting the user configure everything, then sticking with it 
as DEFAULT which the user can overwrite PER APPLICATION because not all apps 
do the same tasks and thinking that there can be a completely universal 
"good" standard is just stupid. Some apps NEED to look different in order to 
actually work usably. I have actually had a lead gnome dev (who shall remain 
nameless) say: "any setting that would only be usefull to one application 
must never be implementable". This I dissagree with 100%. 
As far as I am concerned, too many options for configuration is a lesser crime 
than too few, and every real user agrees with me - and I have a rather 
particular point of authority in this. I have thousands of users, and 95% of 
them were first time computer users when they touched my system for the first 
time. They all had the option of gnome or KDE, and they all tried both, and 
they all preffered KDE - because KDE could look the way they wanted it to. In 
the end TRUE userfriendlyness is recognizing that every user is unique, and 
allowing every bit of the system to be adaptable to the USER's preffered way 
of working - when you have that the computer learns the user and no longer 
vice versa. 
In fact, before I began on OpenLab 4 I did a survey among my paying customers, 
since not a single user was using the gnome desktop by choice. I won't be 
including it in OpenLab4 - I see no point of supporting something my 
customers don't want anyway. The gnome libs are there, cos there are some 
cool gnome apps. But that's it.

A.J.

-- 
A.J. Venter
Chief Software Architect
OpenLab International
http://www.getopenlab.com
http://www.silentcoder.co.za

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