Someone: In short, I don't see UI development as a collection of small projects that can be "glued" to gether to produce a whole. Michael Fair : The Gimp seems to have successfully created a UI in which many different people each take on small projects. Alain: When a project is well-designed and all mapped out (by the analyst), then it is easy and even recommendable to delegate the work of coding of each modular component (by the programmers). This "classic" division of labour insures that there is an overridding design behind the entire project despite the number of participant programmers. Michael Fair : Here again we see the plugin approach. Alain: Modularity is next to Godliness! (in programming circles). The growing preponderance of object-oriented programming attests to this fact. But, given the fact that we are open source, shouldn't we be including these components into the source code, instead of calling external code that resides in a plugin? Isn't there substantially more performance overhead with plugins than "native" code? Michael Fair : The only thing that is not a plugin for their UI is the main menu bar, and last I heard even that was going to be rewritten as a plugin. Alain: I am not sure about the plugin part, but the fact that everything is completely modular cannot be bad, eh! Michael Fair : I agree that the whole metaphor/look and feel should be agreed upon ... Alain: I emphatically agree. Michael Fair : (or guided by one person) Alain: The one-person approach is NOT advisable in my opinion, despite the apparent efficiency of this lone-ranger approach. In the short-term though, given that we have very few members and much to accomplish, it may well be that one person guides the UI effort. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com
