Subject: toolbar art (was Re: Re[2]: AbiWord Interface Review)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Aug 13 2001 - 11:50:12 CDT
At 03:13 PM 8/13/01 +0100, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
> --- Dmitriy Kostiuk <dk@fromru.com> wrote: > Hello
>> There is one more solution. If icons are stored
>> separately (not in
>> executable file) than user can change the
>> application
>> look-and-feel to
>> resemble his favorite platform. May be that would be
>>
>> the best way?
>> The basic icon set is one of GNOME style and you can
>>
>> additionally
>> download some other icon packages and please
>> yourself
>> by simply copying
>> its contents to a specified folder. And some other
>> users would prefer
>> to have it 'as is' because they like GNOME icons.
>
>If other feel this is the way to go I have no
>objection. It seems to be one valid solution better
>than the current implementation. Cons are probably
>very slightly increased bloat and of course a coder
>who want to implement it (:
Uh, is anyone seriously proposing that we start heading down a "skins" path
for AbiWord? Wow. I would have thought that:
- using native code (so it's fast),
- using native widgets (so it looks right), and
- honoring platform-specific colors and themes (for customization)
would be more than "native enough" for any desktop user on Windows, Mac,
etc.
(There are also usability arguments to be made about the problems with
over-customizing the user interface to a commonly-used application, but
there's no need to go into that now.)
More to the point, I really like the artwork on our existing toolbar
buttons, and see no good reason to replace them wholesale. For a
Windows-only user, there's nothing GNOME-ish about them. (Unfortunately,
for most desktop users today, gnomes are fairy tale creatures who have
nothing to do with software.)
I realize that some Windows software products *do* try to imitate even the
toolbar button artwork from MSFT applications -- but many of them are
backed by investors who'd like nothing better than to get bought out and
become another product in the MSFT family. For example, Visio, PowerPoint,
and SourceSafe were all originally developed by separate companies with
MSFT-lookalike UIs.
I see no reason to go too far down that path, either. ;-)
I've used a number of Windows products, and I enjoy seeing applications
who've done a subtle and classy job of reinterpreting the standard toolbar
artwork. It gives you a very clear sense that you're using Netscape, or
Eudora instead of whatever MSFT's offering in those product categories might
be.
There are some differences we should be proud of, and this is a biggie.
What we currently have is plenty native enough for me. We're native where
we need to be, while still preserving uncannily close similarities between
our implementations on each platform.
Isn't what we have the best of both worlds already? On each platform, it's
very clearly a native app, yet the switching costs to get productive in
AbiWord on another platform are almost negligible.
Paul
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