Re: Look and Feel

[Banlu Kemiyatorn]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:01:49 -0600 (CST), Jesse Ross
<jesse@jesseross.com> wrote:

> This is kind of a chicken and egg thing. I think a new interface could
> attract new developers. In turn they would likely build more apps. We
> would no doubt lose some, as there would no doubt be some who do exactly
> what you said above. We might also attract some people interested in
> programming, and through the great development tools and wealth of
> Objective-C info around because of Mac OS X, with a little training, we
> might get some new developers that way.

Yeh, but one more point to add. How long and how well do you think
that the kind of developers that will do app because it looks great
out-of-the-box and ignoring the fact that theming system will work well
can maintain their own applications? From my experience, I never know
the kind of developers those are more artist than coder can do stuffs
that is very easy to maintain. Their code always looks like crap and impossible
to read for most of the time. I also regard that theory onto myself :)
Artists are extremely important, and it is important that both developer and
artist should try to understand the other side's nature.

My position.
1. The default theme should be desktop environments' duty.
Default theming is a very important subject as it being discussed,
but it has nothing to do with GNUstep except to allow the
possibility with less diminishing returns on important factors, for me, speed.
At this point it is clear that theme system won't reduce GNUstep's speed.

2. Since the theming has nothing to do with GNUstep,
it should focus on the look that current developers are happy
to work on. New look that intensively changed the old one
/may/ attract new great great hackers to work directly in -gui
but I don't see any potential.

3. The default system shouldn't prevent any standard app to work
properly. eg. the text should be rotatable. Things should fully work,
not partly work. I don't want to tell users that they need to
switch their backend to get things to work. If it doesn't work, fix it.
And the default system should be something that is easier to fix,
but not impossible to fix.