The latest beta of Red Hat 8, named “null”, released a couple of days ago, includes some UI changes, mostly new icons, showing the clear wish of Red Hat to enter the corporate desktop market. Texstar from PCLinuxOnline posted some screenshots of his Null beta, so you can see the UI changes for yourself. I took the time this afternoon to try and suggest ways to clean up the new Red Hat UI even more (particularly, the menu). See the original shot, and the modified one. Our previous article, based on a random shot of Red Hat’s older UI can be found here.
Red Hat “Null” Beta Includes Many UI Changes
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It would be arguable that some of the UI tweaks or clean ups discussed here could cualify as bugs. You have to be cautious with this and try a more kind approach to the developer, I don’t think bugzilla would be the way, the ideal would be to simply send some feedback regarding all this UI stuff, once the competent developer is identified (remember this is RedHat). All the suggestions come from Eugenia, we are here analizyng them, I myself have only pointed one UI thing that according to Spark the RedHat team already knows well. I am not entitled to send feedback with ideas that belong to another person.
These ARE NOT complains, read on again our comments because I don’t recall one single complain, on the contrary we are thankful and excited with all the fantastic UI work RH is doing. We like it so much, we analyze it from top to bottom with constructive criticism, no complains here (it would be absurd).
I don’t know if this is a UI bug, kind of. In this Null screenshot, http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/contrib/texstar/screensh… , on the top of the window toolbar the text labels ‘File’ and ‘Bookmarks’ are underlined by a 9 pixels long line, the rest of the text labels (‘Edit’, ‘View’, ‘Go’, ‘Help’) have 10 pixels long underlining. It should be either all 10 pixels or all 9 pixels underlines.
In My Humble Opinion, 10 pixels is 1 pixel too long, all those text labels should have 9 pixels long underlines.
Not exactly a ‘problem’, just polishing things up.
Forget the 9 pixels rant, I just noticed that’s the same thing everywhere, I’d rather have all those details homogenized.
Just another thought. I am looking at various window buttons:
The RedHat Null Bluecurve theme
http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/contrib/texstar/screensh…
RedHat Limbo2
http://spud.osnews.com/osnews/img/1489/limbo1.png
GNOME Crux theme
http://spud.osnews.com/osnews/img/1489/limbo2.png
Microsoft WindowsXP
http://www.ivt.baum.ethz.ch/otscreenshotWinXPE.html
Microsoft Windows2K
http://www.nesbitt.com/bugcollector/web/bcwscreenshot.gif
Various Apple Aqua screens
http://advergence.com/newspage/images/macosxdesktop.jpg
http://hem.netlink.se/~sft3929/screenshot.jpg
And the first thing that comes to mind is: WOOOW!!! AWESOME, that Aqua first screenshot sure looks sexy to me, man that single screen is way better than a hundred silly make-the-switch videos.
Then I calm down a bit and concentrate on the window buttons of these GUIs. All but the RH Null theme have separated window buttons. It is obviously especially important the separation of the close window button from the other two (minimize and restore).
In the Windows2k that I staring at right now, the separation is just 2 pixels long, but visual. The interesting fact that I discover playing with it is that the separation is just graphical, clicking on those 2 pixels would restore the window. I don’t like that.
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (1.0)
Chapter 1. Usability Principles
Forgive the User
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…In all cases, the user’s work is sacrosanct. Nothing your application does should lose or destroy user’s work without explicit user action. Among other techniques, this can be achieved by auto-saving backups of documents, and allowing multiple levels of undo.
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http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/usabilityprinciples…
That dangerous graphical setting of the close window button is sometimes prevented from losing data by confirmation dialogs. Sometimes, because for example in a browser tabbed window like Mozilla’s I don’t remember any confirmation dialog when only closing those windows and not the browser itself, having to confirm those actions inside Mozilla would be annoying most of the time. I don’t have that confirmation either inside the Opera browser, and again I don’t think that’s a lacking feature, all is necessary, it would always be helpful, is having the DANGEROUS button a little bit separated from the next one.
To achieve that window close button separation in an aesthectic pleasant way within the Bluecurve theme, the window title bar should be fatter (as Eugenia already pointed out) and the buttons should now look as squares inside that tittle bar (with about 3 pixels of tittle bar space over and under the buttons). I dont think that having the close button 2 pixels away is enough, 4 would be better. The buttom at the other end of the tittle bar (is it the stick one?) should be modificated in the same way (square inside the bar with space over and under).
MS WindowsXP has the close button in red color, that differentiation is good also. Doing just that (using the red color because of its association with DANGER!) would be marketing unwise: riots of Linux zealots complaining about copycating XP on this. So it would be better to simply choose another color, a noncolor actually, like the all scary black.
End of the rant.
“It would be arguable that some of the UI tweaks or clean ups discussed here could cualify as bugs. You have to be cautious with this and try a more kind approach to the developer”
Bugzilla is not just for bugs but also for enhancements (you can mark the bugs as such). Things that would really improve the visual quality should be send there. The developers can still close them if they disagree. I’m sure that’s easier for them than wading through several websites (which they don’t anyway) and emails.
As for the non-separated close button, this might interest you:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83129
The above is crippled.
Check out http://dot.kde.org/1030073479/
GNOME guys are okay with it, though. The KDE guys are also angry by the removal of the “About KDE” box.
Well thanks again Spark, it sure interests me, boy you hit Right-On-Target!
It is weird though that a GNOME ‘bug’ opened on 2002-05-27 is reproduced two months later by RedHat’s Null Bluecurve theme, they don’t seem to be taking this one very seriously. Especially when red hatter Havoc Pennington is the second one to answer and essentially agrees with this GUI problem:
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This is a pref rather than a theme thing because changing themes shouldn’t cause weird UI disruption, just harmless aesthetic change, IMO. Plus you shouldn’t have to hack themes if you want the other button order.
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This could also demonstrate that defaults matter-> you set a lame non supported theme and you are on your own in loosing data.
Problem is that this ‘six positions’ preference solution for the buttons adds complexity to something that should be trivial, and clutters the preference menu with even more settings, something I understand these same people were trying to rationalize a bit.
It all comes down to simply providing themes with a space between the dangerous button, that and a theme guideline pointing this out. An eclectic solution would be to deter somehow the GNOME desktop from themes without that space, but no more preferences settings thank you.
Borgmann even sets the color red, that is pretty obvious.
http://62.26.209.204/download/amadeus/Amadeus-Screen.png
Borgmann says:
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Actually the spacer is no real spacer as this doesn’t seem possible right now, the spacer still belongs to the maximize button. But it shows what I mean.
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Well guess what, that is again just what I was ranting about: the 2 pixel space in Windows2k, it’s not a real spacer, it still belongs to the maximize button also. The spacer achieves its function anyway, though with that nuissance.
Party is on!!! No, seriously, at this moment I see some people running amok, someone even talked about agressively controling the way KDE looks, fortunately he was quick and wisely answered:
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‘ Is it time to take a more agressive stance on packageing so we can keep some control how KDE looks?’
I am afraid you can not do that (GPL).
How KDE looks like? Good question
Take a look at the screenshots on kde-look.org or even on kde.org and you will see that KDE has thousands of different looks (though mostly MacOSX-Aqua-like and WinXP-like). You can download gnome icon sets from kde-look.org (BTW, they are excellent) and many of gnome’s (sawfish) window decorations ported to IceWM for KDE. We also used to have a gtk-theme importer for KDE 2xx.
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They are doing an awesome job at RedHat, someone in Linux is targeting the desktop in a far more profesional and complete way than other takers (two?). I had not seen the screenshots of Null running KDE, you have to like that visual consistency aim (obviously not exactly the same at this date), between GTK/QT with Wonderland/Bluecurve or whatever its name is.
http://home.student.utwente.nl/j.potman/redhatnull/kdevelop_about_k…
Button UI ‘bug’x2 -> GNOME&KDE
I dislike RedHat move to make its own set of icons, I already hate icons enough to have the biggest distro bringing more icon chaos. Saying this is a distro trademark, a way to differentiate itself, is like saying that the sky is blue, quite redundant IMHO. The point is that this way of trademarking is also a pain in the ass in a very much populated world like the UNIX one. This said, I am excited as most people about what they are doing to Linux on the desktop, when the rest of the Linux world seemed so pathologicaly passive or incompetent or unmotivated. So I’m very willing to ‘forgive’ this icons trademark, not that grave after all.