I was reading Adam’s preview of Red Hat Limbo beta 2 the other day, and was also checking out his screenshots. I already did a Gnome 2 review a few months back, and a month ago I did a more constructive article on KDE 3’s UI. This time, I just picked a random screenshot off Adam’s article, and I will suggest some UI changes to make it look better. IMNSHO, as always of course, so be prepared. Update: My post to Gnome Usability mailing list, regarding a more refined/fixed version of my GUI suggestion for the specific theme discussed.As many of you already have noticed so far, I am a control freak. I want my work, my life and especially my desktop to be pixel perfect. You either give me something that looks good, or I will trash it in my review. That’s the deal, and I am not hiding behind my own finger. Whatever I find good, it will be praised, but if I find flaws, these will be pointed out in a pretty critical manner.
So, I opened up Gimp last night, and tried to modify a part of this screenshot. I tried to modify just its two preferences panels, a Font Preferences one (made by Red Hat and not by the Gnome project, I think, doesn’t really matter) and a Theme panel.
Please note, that I do not just criticize Red Hat here, but also Gnome2, the person who did the themes, and the GTK+ project, as all of them have their own small part to that overall UI disaster that was shown before me on an OSNews article. It is not one person’s fault, and it is not one’s team fault. It is the fault and miscommunication of many people, many projects and companies. The fact that a Linux desktop is consisted from many different components made by different teams, is its strong point, but when speaking of its UI, is its plague. Inconsistency to the max.
Same goes for KDE, of course, but Gnome2 has more visible problems. For a UI to work well, the people doing the toolkit, the UI designers, the developers, the font engine guys and the distribution company should be under the same “roof”. You either having the developer on a meeting with his UI designer, and the font engine guy talking to the Toolkit team face to face about how to make things better, or you end up creating UI atrocities, glued together.
Oh, yeah, flame as much as you want. I am wearing my flame proof Dolce & Gabana jacket. At least I respect my (jacket) designers. 😉
All I did in the following screenshots was to clean up the UI of two preference panels that will come with Linux’ more popular distribution: Red Hat. I did nothing more and no less. As a user, I do not care who did what, and who programmed or designed what, what I care, is that it should look good, consistent, and logical. Some of my clean ups are only 1 pixel changes here and there, or changing a color to a tiny tint different one. To see many of my changes you will need to zoom in or wear your glasses in order to notice the rounded widgets or the change of some colors. But when you look to the original and to the modified one, side by side, possibly from a distance, the modified one just feels more “right”.
The Original | The Modified |
Please note, that most of the following points, can apply to whatever theme is used. They are generic enough.
Changes I made:
1. ALL the widgets are now rounded. Just one pixel off their corners and you immediately get this nice smooth feeling. Combo boxes, buttons, Tab Views, Sub-Views, the font input text etc, are all have been rounded.
2. The Theme Panel’s “Help” and “Close” buttons do not perfectly align with the Tab view.
3. That huge Nimbus font used *everywhere* at the *same* size (no matter if it is plain text, or widget text) is terrible. Its characters are glued to each other in many cases, it is big and it is ugly. I simply used the ever present, Arial font. It is not something that you find in space, just Arial, in different sizes and modes. Please replace it with whatever equivalent font, if Arial costs too much to license or something.
4. The little underline under each word’s letter than happens to be a hot shortcut, it is too big.
5. That “Details…” button on the Font panel is stupid. It does not really give you a clear idea of what it does. Does it give you more details on the choice you just clicked? Does it give you details for all the Font Rendering settings available?
Check my “More Settings…” (rather modernized) HTML-like link instead of an abrupt button. Of course, here, I have to guess that this “Details…” button is about having more settings.
6. The Theme panel has unnecessarily big width. In fact, the font used inside the list view should have been smaller anyway, but even with the current font size, the list view is too big. I can hardly imagine someone naming a theme as long-ish as “My Beautiful Atlantian Theme – Under the GPL too! Hoorah!”
7. The “install new theme” and “go to theme folder” buttons have been aligned with the list view in my version. I also changed the “Go to Theme Folder” to “Open Theme Folder”. “Go To” might mean that the current application might change to a file manager and get you away from the current view (that of course, doesn’t happen, but “Open Theme Folder” is more correct).
8. The default radio buttons are too big. They look like holes…
9. The input text placeholder showing “abcdefgop AO” etc., have unnecessarily big height. Instead of the characters to be aligned “middle” in the text field, they are aligned “bottom”, leaving all this white space on top of them. Also, the fourth input text placeholder is wrongly, 2 pixels shorter than its neighbors. Also, the first row is one pixel off on the left, than the second row.
10. Very important: The background color of the “Font Rendering” child view and the background color of the Tab child view on the Theme panel is now RGB(226,226,226) while the parent view is RGB(230,230,230). It is hardly noticeable, but it really helps creating a real object oriented system, with colors and boldness, making it nice and logical to the user’s eyes. The parent view should have the fairest color, any children views should have a tint bit darker color, and the buttons and widgets should be a bit darker than that. In our case, the buttons are now RGB(222, 222, 222). A window’s menu background (File, Edit etc) should also have this tint different color as the tab view or any other child view. Object orientation is a Good Thing (TM), even at your desktop, even when created with nothing by colors.
11. The line around the “Font Rendering” child view is now a bit darker, making the child view more distinct.
12. And talking about object orientation with colors regarding views, the same should be true for the text. Notice that I have as “Arial, bold, size 8” the headers of the Tabs, and the child view of “Font Rendering”. It is really like a header to a new chapter/child view, and it should look like one. To do all that today, a theme can’t do it. You need the GTK+ guys to allow this! Come on guys, you know you want to do this, even if it breaks the current themes and even if the current available fonts for Linux suck when used in different sizes or enable boldness. But do the right thing and ask people with money and a reason to do so (e.g. Red Hat, Mandrake and other companies richer than you and me) to license better fonts to get bundled with XFree86, because the default configuration is the only one that matters, not what a user might or might not change (IF he/she is allowed to change in a corporate environment anyway).
13. Buttons are Arial size 9, and normal text is size 8.
14. The combo/drop down boxes have been made smaller (via code you can tell the combo box to have a standard default size, even if the inside data might need more space – the box will expand when in use to meet the size of its larger option). They are also centered and their accompanied text on the left side, they now have been aligned on the right (and not on the left as they were originally – hope this makes sense).
15. Notice the Tab differences between the two shots. The modified version exhibits an inset look of the non-selected tab.
16. Now, create event states for all major widgets (for example, for buttons it would need tiny bit different looks for onMouseOver, when selected, when pressed and onMouseOff) for all themes included in an official distro, and there you go, you get a great, clean UI.
17. I won’t talk; neither did I touch this window manager theme and the thick/unattractive border it exhibits around the window. It looks bad, unoriginal and it should not be used as the default one (not sure if it the default or not for Red Hat 8).
And these were more than 15 points of modifications needed (without counting the actual window manager issue), to only two preference panels. I do not want to think how much time I need to spend to modify or simply clean up the whole distribution’s UI and/or Gnome2 (sorry Spark, too much work to do :). It is a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. People will pay money to Red Hat. But I won’t, unless they fix these issues on each and every window or menu they include. MacOSX’ Aqua might be a bit too much for some, but overall, their UI is really refined and carefully designed, as they have some great UI and graphics designers in their premises (everyone knows that I am not a big Apple fan, but I recognize that they have the best UI/gfx designers in the industry).
Red Hat or Gnome2 UI designers should go over all of their applications, developers should listen to their designers and fix their mess, and the Toolkit developers should also listen to UI designers to enable some of the color and fonts changes discussed above. As for the distributions, should employ people to clean up the GTK+ and window manager themes that they are going to use, to something better crafted, and then send these changes back to the theme developers. As for the XFree86 and Freetype people, they should do something together to fix their font interoperability issues, and license or create 2-3 fonts that are looking good, for a change.
And the most important one… What’s the deal with that ugly mosquito (update: now they tell me it is a dragonfly; whatever…) as the default background on Red Hat Limbo (or so I was told)? It is repulsive. If Red Hat wants to be closer to nature (as WindowsXP and Lycoris seem to exhibit a similar urge lately in their background images), it is better to choose something cuddly instead. A big fluffy sheep eating grass in a nice, open field, for example. 😉
Yeah, some will find me funny today, others will find me nasty. What I really am though is very serious.
The change to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf is for system wide changes. Individual User changes should be made to $HOME/.fonts.conf.
For a system wide change, /usr/share/fonts/defaults/TrueType would be a better location. It’s also in the default fontserver configuration in the new XFree86 packages.
Hmmm… I think the screenshot looks very good to start with(better than any other linux desktop), and slightly afterwards. It is obvious that a _lot_ of work has gone into gnome 2, and that redhat have done quite a bit on top of that – Well done guys, please keep the improvements coming.
To the Author: Please could you do another artice on gnome 2, this time focusing on Nautilus 2 – i think this is one area of gnome which still has a lot of room for improvement, and I’m sure they’d be happy to listen to your suggestions.
my opinions:
I think the “rounding” of the corners looks really bad – maybe it looks curved if you’ve got bad eyesight, but to me it looks like there’s a bit missing. Don’t make this change.
The different background colour makes a big difference it
just feels better with that extra change.
I really don’t like the idea of a hyperlink there – leave it as it is.
Layout/alignment – the new layout looks better, but is much harder to read (probably because of the right alignment), so maybe stick with the reduced size, but don’t right align the text.
The bold text in the tabs looks bad (especially in the non-active tab, it’s too distracting)
I think a lot of it is down to personal taste – a few of the changes should be made, and will make it feel more polished, but some of them shouldn’t.
> To the Author: Please could you do another artice on gnome 2, this time focusing on Nautilus 2 – i think this is one area of gnome which still has a lot of room for improvement, and I’m sure they’d be happy to listen to your suggestions.
Good idea. I might give it a whirl soon.
“Where did you get the idea that HTML has good layout management?”
I didn’t. I was trying to convey the idea that layout could be derived from heirarchical content, the manner of which could be influenced by styles. HTML was chosen as an example. TeX/LaTeX is another, probably better example.
One of the reasons for the three languange layer HTML/CSS/JS is that it (HTML) has been extended into regions for which it was not originally concieved. My only point is that it may be possible to develop a specialized dialog layout language that could further separate some of these usability and appearance issues from the widget engine.
-todd
You’re right, the radio buttons probably aren’t the best choice. One additional reason would be Fitt’s law, i.e. it just takes to long to activate the button, as they’re pretty small. This isn’t as much an issue when they’re grouped closely together.
Probably the best alternative would be making the whole picture and associated description a (non-beveled) button.
And nothing says help more than, well, H-E-L-P. Icons don’t really add to the functionality or look of an interface. In todays GUI world they’re too cute and unprofessional. This ain’t Bob.
A 1984’s Mac? Sure, as pretty much after that had a severe case of second-system effect. They just kept piling features on top of it. The most “innovating” thing we got is the Web, a throwback to the late seventies…
Gtk uses layout elements from TeX already, if I’m not mistaken. Still, that only makes resizing dialogs better, nothing more. It’s hard enough to get letters into words, words into lines and lines into paragraphs. Getting pretty abstract GUI metaphors automatically layout seems a very unlikely task.
Let’s take the font selection as an example. On what level should we attack this? create_combobox_with_label(label, list) would be pretty easy and all GUI elements would look the same (e.g. label right-aligned, correct font-sizes etc.).
Letting the computer figure out “Well, make a good combination of size selection and individual font selection” is clearly the realm of sci-fi AI. It’s hard enough for human minds to get a sensible solution.
Eugenia,
I will begin by saying that your work is a vast improvement on the default Gnome 2. I will make one small change to complete your look and feel…
You forgot to remove the upper left single pixel on the tab view. 😉
Regards,
Jason “Maverick” VanDerMark
Proud BeOS User
>You forgot to remove the upper left single pixel on the tab view. 😉
Indeed.
The layout of the radio buttons in this font dialog neither clusters the choices together nor puts them in a sequential order. Why they even used radio buttons is beyond me.
Indeed. Although, note that radio button means a button which behaves like the physical buttons you might find on some old radios; it’s not the little circle that makes it a radio button.
Also the “Help” button’s icon stands out as a problem area. Or rather, the problem is that it doesn’t stand out. There is a population stereotype that two overlapping red rectangles (aka ‘Red Cross’) means “help”, “aid”, “assistance”, etc. This would be highly preferabe to the striped “doughnut” that keeps people guessing.
I thought it was a peppermint when I first saw it. 🙂
Fortunately, it is a stock icon and can be themed away.
Maybe after some screenshots get popular with a different icon, Gtk+ will change. Perhaps there’s a bug report about it.
Such buttons shouldn’t have icons anyway. Everytime removing icons from buttons or app menus comes up, there is much whining and people claim that since it can be themed off it should be left as is.
That the GNOME usability project (assuming they looked this design over. My apologies if they haven’t) . . .
AFAIK, this is only in RedHat. I doubt anyone from GUP saw it and I don’t recall seeing it on the mailing list.
. . . didn’t catch these awful designs within 5 seconds of looking at them speaks volumes about why linux has been having so many terrible usability problems and why a macintosh from 1984 is still more usable than tomorrow night’s build of GNOME or KDE.
Dude, the Lisa is more usable in the domain where it works. Even if the usability project had been aware of this, it doesn’t mean they would have been able to do anything about it. Just catching the error doesn’t mean there’s a good solution and it certainly doesn’t mean that anyone who can do anything about it will care.
you said:
“Some people are going to call me a moron for insisting on this, but why on earth do we need to antialias all fonts? ”
Why? I think it looks good. I even turned off hinting! I’ve been trying to find a way to do anti-aliasing for all point sizes in Windows 2000, but Microsoft decided, apparently, not to offer that option. You know them — they know better!
On Xfree, you can actually alter the font rendering quite a bit depending on face, point size, etc. — you can get exactly what you want; which is fonts below a certain size hinted, but not anti-aliased.
Arial is a bastard font, poorly designed. Use Helvetica instead.
I hate to be a pain… but,
the original looks better to me.
When I see hyperlink text in an application it makes me think that it’s a reference online. At home that means a dialup, so I won’t click it. I agree that it makes sense for hyperlinked documentation, though without a status bar to see where the link goes I probably just wouldn’t click it.
I do see a need for a light-weight button however. A clickable button that is of less importance than others. Perhaps that could be done as a smaller button, rather than as a hyperlink.
I completely agree about the spacing of the radio buttons. At first glance it was confusing.
Michael, an 8 points antialiased font looks good to you? It is hardly readable!!!
If you want to antialias all fonts in MS-Windows, you are going to have to move to WindowsXP as you probably already know. There you have both options for smoothing fonts, the standard method that I described before seems to me the smartest choice, not for you, ok. Just don’t tell me that all antialised font sizes look crystal clear and neat, because that is simply not true, the antialiased font edges get more blurry as the size decreases.
I’ll repeat here that I like and I want antialising, bold and big fonts look dreadful when not antialised, the only fonts that I don’t want antialiased are the small ones that are not old nor italic>>> Microsoft’s standard method. What I’d like to have in Linux is a desktop OS that provides a simple radio button to choose that antialiasing option.
The last KDE3 that I tried provided a similar option: an antialiasing size range. I haven’t seen this in GNOME2, and I’m begining to like a lot more GNOME2 than KDE3.
Before I had that option graphically displayed in the KDE3 preferences panel, I was told of how to edit it manually. That is regarding size range, ’cause though it has to be very simple I still don’t know how to tell the font renderer to always antialias bold and italic fonts, any size (‘a la Microsoft’).
I don’t like copycating Microsoft for the shake of it, trying to copy their icons, themes, system structure and overall GUI behaviour seems to me ridiculous, IMHO not headed to desktop stardom as some naively think (Lycoris, Xandros, …). But if the Beast does something technically right, and I belive handling fonts is one of them, I don’t see why not to implement it right away. It isn’t something complex nor obscure to achive, it just needs of a GUI designer and an employer like RedHat or Ximian or GNOME or LGB or… someone!
GNOME2 is looking very well, I see it as most people as a giant step from GNOME1, and RedHat Limbo ‘kicks ass’. If they find a solution for the usual Linux font mess, well then RedHat8+GNOME2 would be awesome. I don’t like the Windows killer thing (a 10% share would be allright for a start), but imagine RedHat completing the Multimedia distribution and having a beautiful GNOME2 with atention to UI details, that shall rock as a Desktop OS.
I forgot to congratulate Eugenia for this great article. GUI design is such a beautiful and interesting subject. More like this please.
So it’s hardly appropriate to say “if GNOME doesn’t look like my suggestion, it’s going to get bad reviews.”
I know this will sound completley unfathoamable, … completely mind blowing, … but I think what GNOME needs is an UI design expert (Eugenia, what exactly is your job? Is it maintaining OSNews? Do you have examples of your previous work as a UI designer somewhere?)
Some of the things in the ‘after’ shot look better, others don’t. Overall, it looks worse, to me. It’s a personal thing.
The ‘More Settings…’ hyperlink is seriously dumbfounding.
Its a bad shot ill say that much, but dragonflies are pretty and arent disgusting like houseflies.
There are a few valid points here. Aligning the Help and close button properly is a must,
The window border is not the default theme. It is a pretty poor theme actually, and the default is IMHO a much better theme.
The html-link is just a horrible idea. Labeling it better is a good idea though.
The selected fonts in the “improved version” is way too small. Most people using Red Hat 8.0 as a desktop will most surely have big enough resolution that RHs sizes look better. Even if Microsoft normally uses 8pts.. the users of Windows XP and Red Hat is totally different. This also is hardly going to detract people.
The _choice_ of font is a valid point however. At least the commercial version of Red Hat should include very nice quality licensed fonts.
The smoothing of widgets is a matter of taste, and I happen to think that it looks better than what Eugenia states is better. Eugenia leaves no room for taste however, which is PURE arrogance.
Sub-widgets could have slightly different colors. Good point.
The point about radio buttons is also a matter of taste. The ones Eugenia proposes are too small. IMHO the current ones look better. Eugenia leaves no room for taste, that is pure arrogance.
Calling this a mess, and stating that this is a huge deal, is also pure arrogance. It makes the assumption that what Eugenia considers important is what everyone else should consider important.
Polish should be considered. The valid points Eugenia have, should be addressed, but Eugenia strikes me as incredibly arrogant.
These kind of things should go to the bugzilla of redhat. Simple as that. If it requires changes to gnome, gtk, freetype, they will send it to another bugzilla, or send a patch. This article is pretty worthless if it doesn’t go in to the bugzilla. Do you expect developers to browse the net to search for bugreports?
Every single time I reported something at a bugzilla (Redhat, Gentoo, Mozilla, Lunar Linux,..), I got a response the next day, and a fix less then a week later. (or a lenghty discussion in the case of mozilla :-))
I don’t agree with you on some points. Fonts should never be that small by default. Most people *don’t* have a perfect vision, and alot of people will operate at a resolution that is quite high. No, it isn’t because of the anti-aliasing. Without anti-aliasing fonts at point 8 are still to small. Not only on my linux computer, but also on my windows computer.
Having a hyperlink-thingie in a dialog is pretty stupid from a usability point of view. It should be a button. Simple as that. Don’t use widgets for something they are not meant to be used for.
Eye candy should never stand in the way of usability, and certainly not by default.
I am a user who is considering moving to Linux and I have to say that though I hate Microsoft and Windows and I believe that Apple’s OS X is not the way to go I think that they (especially apple) do a much better job of the UI. I think that there is some serious improvement required as I think the new image points out. Some of the errors that were found would just plain annoy me. At least Microsoft can have boxes that are the same size every time.
Check my reply on your mailbox.
> These kind of things should go to the bugzilla of redhat
I am currently on GNOME’s Usability mailing list. I suspect, that the guys there, will make sure to fix some of the things pointed out.
This is still the problem with *all* linux gui
I’ve seen. I’d really like to have more stuff on my screen.
And the screenshots still contain too much *white* space.
What if you have 300 themes, not just 7 in that list?
I think the modified version makes a good improvement to the overall asthetic feel and quick-to-use sort of usability no matter how subtle the changes are.
I escpecially like the replacing of the ugly “details” box with a hyperlink saying “more settings”. One of my biggest remaining critisms of many Linux UI’s is the ‘tacky box’ look of many of the buttons (including “close” and “help”), the same goes for the drop-down menu boxes for the fonts, although to be honest, I still think they could be made to look even better then appears even in the modified screenshot.
This may all just be a personnel preference of mine, I guess its because I’ve seen so many broekn linux themes of that style (i.e. where the border lines go out of alignment etc.) that I have a phobia of ‘thin black border line’ style looks.
Giving both shots a quick lookover (as a user would see them) I just could’t see any improvements in Eugenia’s changes. Actually the “before” looked cleaner and easier to use and grasp than Eugenia’s version, which on first glance seemed too fussy. Fonts too small, etc.
I do have training in graphic design, but was not looking at the screenshots from that perspective – only from the perspective of a user. Also, I did read Eugenia’s explanations or justifications for her changes. While they seem good in writing, they do not *look* good in the screen captures. In graphic design, what looks good is good, and no amount of verbal rationalization can change that.
I will give Eugenia credit for having a lot of courage, and an “A” for effort. However, graphic design and fashion does not seem to be her forte. She probably has terrible taste in clothes as well. Can anyone does who brags about wearing asbesteos jackets and slacks have good taste in clothes?. If you carry a flame thrower then you may want to dress accordingly. It would be better for people who breathe fire to also chothe themselves in fire, not in protective clothing. In other words, being an aggressive person, defensiveness does not become Eugenia.
Regarding the dragonfly, that is a common insect here in the Americas. The dragonfly is a helpful insect which eats mosquitoes and other disease carriers. Typically dragonflies hover around ponds where prey is common. Of course sheep are more common in Greece, but many people familair with rural life do not regard sheep to be affectionate, cuddly animals. They can be nasty critters that leave their droppings everywhere and eat everything in sight which has any resemblance to the color “green”. I guess that’s why Greece mostly consists of barren hillsides.
Or it could be because of centuries of warfare among the aggressive, quarrelsome people who have populated that idyllic land.
First off, congratulations to Eugenia for what is, to my eye, a genuine improvement in the image due to her graphic manipulations. Sadly, it appears she has chosen to put more effort into her GIMP proficiency than the tools (words, syntax, sentence structure, proofreading) of her chosen profession (writing).
…that was shown before me on an OSNews article… – the subject in question was presented before Eugenia was presented?
…it is not one’s team fault… – perhaps “one team’s fault”?
…desktop is consisted from many different components – consists of many different components – either “desktop is made (up) of many” or “desktop consists of many”.
And the list goes on; these 3 examples were taken from a single paragraph (the 4th one). This presents 3 possibilities:
1. Eugenia is simply an incompetent writer who needs to look hard at herself and her chosen profession before condemning the hard work of others;
2. The proofreaders (assuming there are any in this venue) need to wake up and actually pay attention to what passes across their screen before presenting it to the world as something by which to judge them;
3. Eugenia is actually an accomplished writer whose primary language is not English; should this be the case she either needs a better translator or she needs to pay closer attention to the minutiae of her chosen written language.
Again, I respect her arguments and her abilities to add subtle enhancements where appropriate; I do not respect her inability to present her arguments with the same subtlety and clarity. I have read her articles before; this is far from an isolated instance.
IMHO after looking for 10 minutes at the two screenshots,
the original seems far better then the modified,because
it’s easier to read and stresses lesser the eyes (maybe the bigger fonts and the lack of anti-aliasing).
The other changes are marginal for my taste and really don’t
improve the UI so much.
TX,
Bye
Well, Eugenio writes in English much better than most who post here, that’s for sure. And how is it that someone does a little UI project, to show what possibly can be done and people end up talking about the condition of the hillsides in Greece? She put up two screenshots and asked us to compare, to see what might be possible for improvement in Linux UI development and, in the end, the thread results in slurs against her homeland and personal attacks on her. This thread could have been an engaging one about Linux UI improvement – and there were good posts, but it degenerated into drivel and personal attacks because people have no ideas on how to improve the Linux UI. And someone who went to the trouble to actually do something concrete to show what could be possible gets crucified. Get a life and go do something constructive instead of tearing people down.
I DO hope that Gtk2’s new Open File … dialog box allows for programmers to put in shortcut buttons or per application customizable bookmarks. In the case of choosing a background image, I’d really like there to be a shortcut to the system’s background images folder as well as to the user’s bacground images folder. If this “bookmark” system is customizable, it’d allow me to bookmark a certain subdirectory but this bookmark would only appear for changing background images.
Hey TX.Fonts sized 35 are easier to read and stresses lesser the eyes.Use them if you are happy with them.Normal people don’t.
“Arial is a bastard font, poorly designed. Use Helvetica instead. ”
Arial is indeed a ripoff of Helvetica, with some very small changes.
But you can’t include Helvetica in a distribution because it is a
copyrighted font.
The only possibility is for somebody to design a new font family for
open Source use, probably something quite similar to Helvetica/Arial.
This is a big job, there are hundreds of characters in a TrueType
font, and you have to do the bold as well.
A serif font like Times (which is also copyright) is twice as much
work because the italic versions are a different design, not just
slanted as in a sans-serif font.
The Nimbus font could be improved with a good set of kerning pairs, or
perhaps these were done but got lost on the way to the Linux screen
displays. That’s why some of the characters are touching each other.
The Nimbus fonts in my Ghostscript setup (Type 1 versions) do have
kerning pairs.
An interesting take, but from a purely aesthetic perspective. Suggesting these changes improve usability is like saying a country’s economic instability can be solved by changing the color of its money.
There are clearly greater usability issues at hand. I applaud your interest in combating these problems, but it seems that in general the overall approach to usability is broken.
For example, what typically happens during application development is that a developer (almost never a usability expert) creates a screen out of thin air (if we’re lucky according to some “standard”).
What I’d really like to see is some real usability research – watching people use an interface to determine where they are confused – and factoring that back into the design of the app.
Even though comments based on aesthetics are important (although some may argue they are irrelevant in the face of gratuitous themability), they eventually boil down to personal opinion. Real usability is grounded in quantitative measures, not opinion.
As a result, we’re left with one choice: Get those usability labs working!
“The Nimbus font could be improved with a good set of kerning pairs, or
perhaps these were done but got lost on the way to the Linux screen
displays. That’s why some of the characters are touching each other.
The Nimbus fonts in my Ghostscript setup (Type 1 versions) do have
kerning pairs.”
OK. I installed the Type 1 version of the Nimbus Sans font that came
with my Ghostscript setup, and I installed the .afm file which
contains the kerning pairs.
I printed out a page using the Pagestream DTP program (available for
Amiga, Mac and Windows) to a Postscript laser printer.
The font is perfectly OK. It is a good imitation of Helvetica and the
kerning is fine. So the nasty effects seen on Eugenia’s “before”
picture must be caused by the font rendering engine. Is this the
latest version of Freetype? Does Freetype use the .AFM file? Or was a
bad conversion to Truetype used?
The on-screen display in Pagestream on the Amiga was even worse – that
program has a known bad screen renderer on that platform.
Eugenia (hi again
, while I appreciate your work on the dialog, I must agree with other posters that much of what you present as the holy grail is just a matter of taste. And it’s not just that this changes from person to person, but oviously also within one person from one point in time to an other:
You yourself said in the Gnome 2 review you referenced:
“Speaking about fonts, the new fonts coming with Gnome, like Nimbus, are great! Coupled with the AA engine, they give a really sexy look to the environment. […] Nimbus plus AA, looks like the default BeOS font. BeOS users will feel at home in this respect.”
Now it’s:
“That huge Nimbus font used *everywhere* at the *same* size (no matter if it is plain text, or widget text) is terrible. Its characters are glued to each other in many cases, it is big and it is ugly.”
Original Gnome 2 review:
“Unfortunately, when launching Gnome for the first time, it picked as default an ugly sans serif font that it was also extremely small for the job (size 10)”
Now:
“13. Buttons are Arial size 9, and normal text is size 8.”
Who is right now, you or you?
> 1. Eugenia is simply an incompetent writer who needs to look hard at herself and her chosen profession before condemning the hard work of others;
What the fuck are you talking about? What profession? We do OSNews for PURE FUN. I owe you nothing to be a better english writer. I do not need to be. If you do not like what the articles is all about, do not come back here. If you do care, don’t try to preach me about proper english, because I don’t fucking care. If you care too much, send me a proofread version, and I will put your version up instead.
> I do not respect her inability to present her arguments with the same subtlety and clarity.
Read here you moron:
http://www.osnews.com/editor.php?editors_id=1
There is always a but. But why don’t you make the changes yourself, and submit them? Come on, crank out the code…
> But why don’t you make the changes yourself, and submit them? Come on, crank out the code…
I do not have any experience or any interest in writing GTK+ code. I prefer Qt and C++ personally. I have already modified a Qt theme written in C++, for my own personal use. But I have absolutely no interest doing anything with GTK+.
And of course, you are missing the point of this article. This article is to clean up a random UI, it is not my job to fix their problems. Only to point them out. This is why I am the editor here, and they are the devs.
I see two perspectives to this: Redhat as a business, and free software.
As a business, Redhat are fools to consider having this group “listen to” that group – their managers have a responsibility to insist that anything that should be done *is* done – and to make sure it’s not dropped in the process. It’s called a requirement. The reason commercial software is buggy is that Executive staff doesn’t put quality above market placement, and development managers don’t fire themselves when the process they use doesn’t get the job done properly.
As for free software, I see more and more it’s about getting off my own butt and doing something instead of complaining about other people. Eugenia sounds defensive in the original article (this is the first I’ve read of her – perhap’s she always writes this way), and that makes me think she expects people might object to her criticism.
She could have put time into writing a script that traversed the source code making the changes she wants – then she would be giving us all a tool that we could use. She could have written her comments from a less attacking attitude – I don’t agree with her “improvements” and don’t agree she’s “got it right” while the rest of us don’t…
She could have put out her examples and asked “what do you think?” instead of telling us all how it should be.
Her opinions and impressions are of interest, but not her blaming, IMO. In the local (NZ) vernacular, Eugenia comes across as a bit “up herself”, and that makes the message difficult for me to listen to. A shame – as I think some of her comments are worth listening to.
Regards
The first thing that struck me about the font dialog was that the 4 fonts had to be chosen independantly. What if you wanted the same font in all 4 places (or slight variation)? You have to pick it 4 times.
The comments on font antialasing are interesting. I started out on high resolution CAD stations which did not antialias, and did not seem to need it. The fonts in my xterms are not antialiased, nor is the font I’m typing in, though some other fonts on this page are (including some small ones, which do look more fuzzy for it). XMag is a useful tool
Also, we have Type1 fonts in X. Aren’t these meant to be better than TrueType? Do we have the processing power now to do Metafont in real time? That can produce nice results.
>I’m pleased that Eugenia is addressing these
>issues. Windows is ugly enough, why does
>Linus have to be even worse?
Aww, come on, he isn’t THAT ugly 🙂
i submitted a screenshot of Limbo to LinuxOrbit.com, and, to me, the UI of Gnome2 has dramatically improved over previous version. i hear things that people who want more control over their desktop can’t get this in Gnome2, but, for me, this is much better.
the screenshot may be found at:
http://linuxorbit.com/modules.php?
op=modload&name=My_eGallery&file=index&do=showpic&pid=156&orderby=date D
and as far as the dragonfly goes, i think it’s beautiful, and so do some people at LinuxOrbit.
What you posted there, is that the default setup of Beta 2?? Or did you rearanged the panels (or used an older setup)?
I’m asking because in Beta 1 they had a different panel setup to be more consistent with their other and older desktops, I didn’t like it that much… So if they would have switched to the new layout like on your screen (which is also the Gnome2 default), this would be great.
Oh and I also love this dragonfly, it’s just beautiefull. Usually I don’t like insects very much but this one is awesome. Dragonflies are quite neat insects anyway but since I heard that they can hurt a LOT, I’m a bit more respectfull when I encounter one…
Firstly for those of us who are not linux literate. There should SO be an easier way of adding fonts to the GUI than to do some hack. In my humble opinion that should be the first thing to get fixed.
Secondly what is the story with all the try hard hack fixes that this or that person should be doing. As a simple user installing patches is something that people who have no idea (me) don’t want to do because they don’t know how or don’t have the time. I am not having a go at anyone but if something is suposed to do the job I expect it to. You should not have to down load this hack or that patch I though that is what testing was for so that you didn’t have to do that.
I have a lot of repect for those that take the time out to do the whole Linux thing but there is still some distance to go before I change my PC at home from XP to Linux
What exactly are you talking about? You shouldn’t need to do any of that.