harsh and constructive comments on UI

[Riccardo]

Hey all,

first my positive comments.

I like the design of:
http://jesseross.com/clients/gnustep/ui/concepts/01/ui.png

some details may be smoothed out, but it has a nice look and it doesn't 
disrupt the *step tradition. It clearly borrows some inspiration from 
aqua's brushed theme but is not a clone of it, in some aspects it is 
even better.

However, as always, this list gets flooded about more or less useless 
comments and opinions about the UI stuff. I don't mean they are wrong, 
sometimes they are just a bit too "unpolitically" expressed. The fact is 
that gnustep has to get complete. SO let's direct our energies there too!

My personal feelings, but apparently they are more or less shared by 
some other traditional developers as I discussed them on IRC, are:

1. The default gnustep theme should be what it is now, just better. a 
100% next and openstep clone. COnsistent in the icons and in the 
details. I like it. Other like it too

2. on the other hand I appreciate the idea of some "official" themes 
that should not be the default, but should be a half a dozen, not more, 
that are easily installable and accessible from the gnustep site. This 
implies
	- more modern or alternative look, but still professional and 
polished, like jess proposal cited above. These should be included in a 
new Live CD for example, as that is for the moment our "demo".
	- easy selection through, for example, a plugin in Preferences.app 
(seems to me the most integrated solution)
	- minimum (better if none) impact on "default" theme users on both 
look, performance and compatibility
	- showing off of these "selected themes" on the gnustep.org site 
would finally calm down those voices that theming is not possible or 
does not allow good looks. This is good to have to cut-down stupid 
comments before they are even born.
	- I don't like the idea of a "contest" the default gnustep theme is 
one and it was done before us. Of course a "gnustep-themes.org" sites 
could exist and it could be linked from the official site. But I would 
not like to see many themes "officially" endorsed by gnustep. Leave the 
user the choice and make them easy installable and selectable.

Again, I point the finger on the problem that GNUstep is "lingering" not 
only for it looks. I remember KDE 1. It had a quite spartan look and had 
no real themes, just some colors (here again, Preferences.app already 
has coloring capabilities, maybe we should slap in some combinations, 
including the default one; currently that pref is not very good). But it 
already had a broader range of integrated and usable utilities!

On this side, I'd invite to have a look at the frameworks omniweb 
released. They could pre useful. License maybe discussed though.

-Riccardo (aka grey gandalf)

PS: I know that after all these good words my two GNUstep applications 
don't have a bad icon: they have none at all. I never came up with 
something satisfactory. Although I can do some design work, it is a long 
work and I often trash the results. I might speak with jess about this 
and other should do it too maybe.