“Following months of study involving ‘usability engineers,
designers, hackers, and Irish wine,’ the GNOME Human Interface
Guidelines have been released. In the announcement, its developers
‘challenge the KDE project to serve the general user community by
partnering with us in developing these guidelines to create a
common Free Software interface style,’ which despite wording that
at first looks contentious appears to be an invitation, not a
dare.“‘This document tells you how to create applications that look
right, behave properly, and fit into the GNOME user interface as a
whole,’ the guide begins. ‘It is written for interface designers,
graphic artists and software developers who will be creating
software for the GNOME environment. Both specific advice on making
effective use of interface elements, and the philosophy and general
design principles behind the GNOME interface are covered.’“The guide is the latest in a series of studies and style guides
that seek to produce consistency and user friendliness in Linux
desktops. GNOME2 advanced both internationalization and
accessibility standards within that project, but a general
application interface styleguide, corresponsing to IBM’s Common
User Access standard, has been elusive…”
Related Story:
Release Digest: GNOME, August 21, 2002(Aug 22, 2002)