Jacque wrote: "Do Linux apps ever invent their own interface entirely, or do they tend to stick to one of the various distro conventions? (Would it matter, for example, if my answer dialog was bright pink and had its OK and Cancel buttons at the top?)"
Cautiously, because I'm not a developer and haven't used these things in anger, it seems to go like this. You have several gui toolkits, of which the most used are GTK (gnome) and QT (Trolltech, used by KDE). There is also FOX and one or two others. If an app is written using one of these toolkits, its look and feel, icon shape and coloring and fonts, will be determined by what's available in the toolkit. In addition, both gnome and KDE have a control panel which allows the user to set the theme. This will set the look and feel (icons, font, colors) of all the Gnome or KDE apps. Independently. You can run either control panel from either or any desktop. For instance, I am using gnome right now on this machine, but in a previous time using KDE had set KDE to use the Sun theme - this was purple menu bars, a sort of dull blue background, and black highlighting. It was fun for a while until the highlighting got irritating, so I fired up kcontrol while under gnome, reconfigured the desktop I was not running, and set the theme to platinum, at which point kmail running under gnome took on a dull metal, blue grey highlight theme. Doing this left sylpheed and openoffice and firefox unchanged. So, there is no distro look and feel, really, because you cannot as a user sensibly confine yourself to apps done in one tookit. You might be deceived on this by looking at Ubuntu out of the box and the fairly restricted theme-set available in gnome. There is not even, really, a KDE look and feel - there are quite a few depending on how one has themed it. What Rev really ought to do is provide for a developer to pick up the the theme in use from either KDE or Gnome. But what a rev developer should do for his/her app is, take a default theme, either KDE or Gnome. Take a well behaved application like Gedit or Kate. Then do something which is compatible. And just accept the fact that for a lot of people using mostly apps from the other Desktop environment, yours will look like they are Gnome or KDE. This does, alas, suggest not using pink! The controls should be done similarly. If you are picking a KDE style, follow the Kate control layout. This stuff matters so little to me that I don't recall how different KDE and Gedit actually are in control placement. Here is an OS News story on customizing KDE. If you're a Mac user the extent of possible customization might be surprising. http://osnews.com/story.php/16813/Tweaking-KDE-3.5.5 Here is their piece resulting in 300 reader desktops being submitted http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=16844 Here is a link into available themes for different desktop environments http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/57/ As you look through this stuff, the reaction might well be, why not pink? Peter _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
