There are two very clear examples of this.

Design in GNOME used to be all about icons. There were icons everywhere. On every button, and for every menu entry. Bugs were filed against things that didn’t have an icon. And in lack of availability of icons for very specific actions the wrong metaphors were chosen, or metaphors that were already used for other actions in a different application. It wasn’t rare to have five different actions with the same icon (and it still isn’t actually). Having icons had become a goal itself, though there are only a handful that are recognisable by the user.

Pretty? Yes. Elegant? No.

A few years ago almost everyone was pretty excited by the release of Compiz, the compositing window manager. And suddenly everybody in the OSS community cared about graphics. “Yeah! We’re going to have amazing effects now! Take that Windows and OSX!”. And it’s true, Compiz could do amazing things and was technically superior to its competitors. Your windows would wobble when you moved them and become semi transparent. When you close a window it would now burst into flames or fold up into a paper air plane and fly off. And last but not least you could spin the desktop cube whilst whales were swimming comfortably inside it.

Impressive? Yes. Elegant? No.

As said, elegance in interfaces doesn’t come from funky graphics and pretty widget themes. It comes down to how your interface is laid out. And this is where developers can help. Andy Fitzsimon made a great presentation for last year’s GUADEC that goes into these things. A must read.

In this post I would like to focus on how some of these aspects apply to GNOME desktop as it is now. Some common things that can be easily tackled:

Can you guess where the come from looking at the screenshots?

Not elegant: Padding / framing where it is not needed.
Where to look: Image / document viewers, video players, games.
Solution: Remove the padding / framing, content should touch the window border.

Not elegant: Double lines.
Where to look: Nested widgets.
Solution: Rethink your application’s design.

Not elegant: Frames.
Where to look: Anywhere.
Solution: Whitespace.

Not elegant: Unaligned widgets.
Where to look: Anywhere.
Solution: Check surrounding widgets for points to align to.

Not elegant: Headers like “Options” or “General”.
Where to look: Preference windows.
Solution: Remove them or come up with something better.

Not elegant: A header for only one or two options.
Where to look: Preference windows.
Solution: See if you can use whitespace to group things together.

Not elegant: Double headers.
Where to look: Preference window tabs.
Solution: Remove the second header.

These are all things that may sound pretty obvious and are probably in the GNOME HIG, but it’s good to really focus on these things and know what to look for. There are a lot more things to look for, but only fixing these things will make a great improvement. If you see things like this please open a bug report against the application, because visual inconsistencies are bugs too! Let’s make GNOME elegant! (and just work as well!)

Click to enlarge. You can also find the larger image on the Usability Whiteboard.

As you can see a lot of inspiration came from Cheese. What Cheese really does well is removing the need to interact with the file system directly. A thing that we should encourage more apps to do. Banshee and F-Spot are two other good examples of this.

I sent this idea to the gnome-media maintainer Marc-André Lureau who sounded pretty excited. So I hope this will land into GNOME 2.30 / 3.0.

Nothing is implemented yet so more thoughts and tips are welcome.

Special thanks to Andreas, Cube and Nick for their suggestions.

1. Go to your home folder
2. Enable “Show Hidden Files” option from Nautilus View menu
3. Then create new folder with name “.fonts” (with dot in front)
4. Now in new folder copy all your true type fonts
5. Now restart and new fonts will be in use.

By the way, this is Linux! You don’t have to restart just run`sudo fc-cache -f -v` in a terminal. But you probably already knew that. Easy isn’t it?

I don’t think so. And things like this get even more annoying when under the stress of an upcoming deadline (Aaaargh). It amazed me how many howto’s there are on the web on how to this, but no easy way to just install a font, while designing something that works takes a lot less time than writing all that documentation. Installing a downloaded font should be obvious, I shouldn’t have to search the web in the first place.

So I figured I should design something myself.

I’d like to be able to install a font by just double clicking it in the file manager. What happens now in nautilus is that it launches the gnome font viewer. Which is ok, but it can be better. Currently, it looks something like this:

Click the image to show my comments.

Here is my redesign with an easy way to install the font:

Click to enlarge.

It’s tiny things like this that make me happy when the computer takes work away from me. But when these tiny things are missing they can add up and result in a huge annoyance. Let’s go and make things just work!

Update: Thomas Wood took my suggestions and implemented it within a day! Just in time for GNOME 2.28. Thanks Thomas!

But awesome posters!

Get the Moblin 2.0 live images to test on your netbook NOW!

You may also have noticed that my icon maintenance on Pidgin have been lacking, but I hope to catch up on it soon. Meanwhile Jakub Steiner did some retouches on the Pidgin application icon, which will make its way into version 2.6. I really love the craziness of the creature. You thought the Pidgin logo was scary? Think again!

One thing that I did get done in my Free time however was a dark GTK theme. I have noticed It made me more productive, as the darkness makes you focus on the content instead of widgets (I sound like salesperson here, don’t I?). It took me a few weeks of tweaking, but I think it’s finally in a releasable state. It’s inspired by Darkilouche and uses the Nodoka engine. I called it “Doka”, meaning “dark room” in Dutch.

Get it here: Doka Dark Theme 1.0.

Preview:

License: GPLv2+.

Hope it may be of use to others as well.

There is already a smaller smiley set, but these use the new (Mango like) style.

Click on the image to download. Extract in your ~/.purple/smileys/ directory. Hope I can get this in the next Pidgin.

I’m really looking forward to working with this great group of people. I’m moving to London soon. Special thanks to to everyone who kept pushing me to go for it (you’ll know).