Hi, Am Montag, den 22.08.2005, 16:19 +0200 schrieb A.J. Venter: > > > > > I would say a more sane approach is that application settings should > > > override theme defaults. I know the gnome guys have this thing about > > > deciding how every human being on the planet ought to think but surely > > > they didn't make it impossible to do this ? Did they ? > > > > The gnome guys think, that fonts and themes should be controlled by the > > user, i.e. every human being on the planet, not by the application, i.e. > > programmer. > > > Oh I've heard their arguments, I even agree with them. It's their METHODS I > don't approve off.
Works pretty well... all gnome apps more or less feel the same. I can use all of them with minimal learning. Which should be the point, cause I dont use the comp to play around with fonts but to get some actual work done. Note that your actual problem comes from the fact that you use a pixel-based widget placement scheme. Your app translated into chinese will not look good with a pixel-based widget placement scheme either. Or hebrew, or any of the "double-width" languages. Or a top-down language. Or on a 10000x10000 pixel monitor. Or on a 320x240 pixel monitor. It will look crap on anything _but_ exactly the system you developed it on. This is bad. gtk uses so-called containers. If you dont specify coordinates and sizes but relationships, you'll never run into those problems. Now I was a delphi user too and I know that there you dont have another choice than using pixel coordinates all over the place. However, I do think that lazarus added better anchors with relationships. Use them. In gtk, "placing" a edit box and, to the right a button is (pseudo-code): container := THorizontalBox.Create; container.BorderWidth := 7; e := TEdit.Create(); e.Text := 'edit'; b := TButton.Create(); b.Caption := 'Boo'; container.Add(e); container.Add(b); window.Add(container); no pixel coordinates or pixel size anywhere in the layout. If you know java, you know what I mean too, there those are called "layouts", which is what they do. Now, in a (completely) pixel-based system, of course having: e := TEdit.Create(Window); e.left := 0; e.width := 250; e.parent := window; e.Text := 'Edit'; b := TButton.Create(Window); b.left := 260; b.width := 200; b.parent := window; b.Caption := 'Boo'; That of course will get you into trouble when the screen size/resolution (and thus the font size has to in order for the user to be able to read anything) changes, the language changes, the window size changes, the theme changes, ..... did I miss anything ? > I think they go about their goal of consistency in completely the wrong way > and fail exactly at what they set out to do - controll by the user. Where KDE > gets it right is letting the user configure everything, then sticking with it > as DEFAULT which the user can overwrite PER APPLICATION because not all apps > do the same tasks and thinking that there can be a completely universal > "good" standard is just stupid. They dont do the same tasks but they do look the same, in gnome. Which is good. I'm actually one of the borderline persons, in that I even hack the filedialogs of qt, gtk and mozilla to be _the same one_. (part 1: http://www.thundrix.ch/projects/gtkfiledialog4qt/ ) > Some apps NEED to look different in order to > actually work usably. I have actually had a lead gnome dev (who shall remain > nameless) say: "any setting that would only be usefull to one application > must never be implementable". This I dissagree with 100%. Note that he probably meant "any setting that would only be useful to one application will never be included into the user-visible gnome settings manager". If so, that would be a prefectly good policy. App settings into the apps. System settings into the system. > As far as I am concerned, too many options for configuration is a lesser > crime > than too few, and every real user agrees with me - and I have a rather depends on what option. > particular point of authority in this. I have thousands of users, and 95% of > them were first time computer users when they touched my system for the first > time. They all had the option of gnome or KDE, and they all tried both, and > they all preffered KDE - because KDE could look the way they wanted it to. In > the end TRUE userfriendlyness is recognizing that every user is unique, and > allowing every bit of the system to be adaptable to the USER's preffered way > of working - when you have that the computer learns the user and no longer > vice versa. > In fact, before I began on OpenLab 4 I did a survey among my paying > customers, > since not a single user was using the gnome desktop by choice. I won't be > including it in OpenLab4 - I see no point of supporting something my > customers don't want anyway. The gnome libs are there, cos there are some > cool gnome apps. But that's it. > > A.J. > cheers, Danny -- www.keyserver.net key id A334AEA6
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