Hi Bernhard, others.
While this discussion is not going to end anytime soon, I'll add couple of
words.
What's been done in Galaxy/Tango is great work. I appreciate the effort in
trying to find style and icons that fit in all the platforms that OOo uses.
It definately is not an easy task.
Historically Mac OS X has been very minor platform in OpenOffice.org. And
this shows also currently. We do not even have native version complete yet.
As a consequence, OOo projects (in general) have had much more emphasis on
e.g. Windows and Linux platforms. This has caused and continues to cause
that OOo on Mac OS X is very non-Mac application.
While it is admirable effort to make OOo a platform independent office
suite, it is a goal that requires making lot's of compromises. If you want
consistency, well then those compromises are ok.
Mac OS X platform and native Mac OS X software emphasise clean design and
"Mac experience". This is much much more important issue on Mac OS X than it
is on any other platform. For example, compare the latest beta of MS Office
for Mac OS X (there are screenshots around) and the Windows version of MS
Office.
If the goal is well-designed application for each platform, instead of
consistency, then it becomes necessary to fine-tune OOo for each platform.
This is just the result of how different e.g. Windows and Mac OS X are, on
the deep level. Some idea can be gotten from comparing the Windows GUI
styleguide and Apple HIG (Human interface guidelines).
The differences are visual, but they are also semantic (e.g. meaning of
looking glass, like clytie said).
Changes are also needed in toolbar design, menu structures, labels in menu
etc...
....
I don't know if the really Mac-like OOo is ever going to happen. OOo
codebase makes that goal very very hard to achieve.
In the meantime, it's nice that platform independent work is going on. At
least we get something better than is currently available.
I see the Mac-like and platform-independent -efforts as parallel projects.
Both are valuable and needed. The latter has much better chances at
finishing what they have started.
Mox
On 1/21/07, Bernhard Dippold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Clytie, all,
Clytie Siddall wrote:
>
> On 21/01/2007, at 10:00 AM, eric b wrote:
> > Bernhard Dippold wrote:
> >> So we'll have to define an iconset (not only for the UI, but as
> >> application and document icons too), that can be used with minor
> >> modifications on Mac OS X, different Linux distributions and
> >> Windows (at least XP and Vista). And on all these platforms the
> >> icons should look as if they had been specifically designed for
> >> that platform.
> >
> > I think this point should be discussed more, because this is
> > extremely important, and we need more opinions, mainly from simple
> > users.
>
> The difficulty is that OpenOffice.org iconsets are aimed at Windows
> users:
> ___
> The Galaxy Design
The difficulty is that OpenOffice.org is aiming at many different
platforms.
My concern is that we lose visual identity if we start to use different
icons on different platforms.
If a user recognizes a program as OpenOffice.org on a platform she didn't
think of before and starts communicating about that fact, then we have the
marketing impact we (at least I) want to achieve by creating a visual
identity.
If on the other hand a Windows user sees OOo on a Mac or a Linux
distribution with different icons (there are already different iconsets for
Gnome and KDE, IIRC) there are three possibilities to react:
1) "Oh - They changed the icons! Looks good :-)"
2) "Different icons? Do they have differences inside the program as well?
What about portability?"
3) "Nice icons, but whatever this application may be, I'll stay with
OpenOffice.org"
Of course the best reaction is 1), but the next question will be: "Why
don't they use these icons on Windows, too?"
Option 2) and 3) are quite bad results if we look at spreading
OpenOffice.org by every possibility we have.
So what we need is an iconset that
- gives Windows users the symbols they know
- adds an Aqua / Tango / Galaxy / whatever style to the icons that can be
integrated in different platforms/GUIs with only minor changes, so the
general impression stays the same whether you see OpenOffice.org on Mac,
Linux or Windows.
I know that this task is not trivial, but it can be achieved, if we find
contributors from all the different places.
Windows users don't need an "oldish" style, Mac and Linux users don't need
different symbols only because they are different from Windows.
What we have, is a platform independent office suite. Let's have platform
independent (at least for the general impression) icons too.
Best regards
Bernhard
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Mox on G
