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[Joe Crawford]

> > I've been involved in a few open source projects, and thought I might
> > be able to benefit xfce. (Which I already think is doing phenomenally
> > well)
> >
> 
> Thanks and we will certainly appreciate your input.
> 
> Well, luckily Xfce is written in plain C ;-) Anyway, doing mockups
> (perhaps using glade) or simply telling us what could be improved can
> already help a lot.

I can use glade, for sure. You use gtk2 right?  I have many gtk2
interfaces with glade.

Worse comes to worse, I can just use gimp/inkscape to mock up stuff.

> I was actually hoping some more people would be interested in reviewing
> Xfce user interfaces and make sure they are consistent and usable. And
> pretty ;-)

I'm more concerned about usability than prettyness, but the visual
layout doesn't strongly affect usability. Often prettyness and
usability go hand in hand.

 
> We don't really have any user interface guidelines, but we generally
> loosely follow GNOME HIG recommendations. For me the most important
> deviation is the spacing around dialogs, which I find a bit too big in
> GNOME (12px), so we generally use the gtk default, which I believe is 6px.

I agree. Actually, in many ways I think Xfce is more intuitive than
gnome. There's no reason it can't be better right across the board,
(while still being super fast). Better preplanning of layout and
interface doesn't cost any cpu cycles.... :)

I do really love the Gnome HIG book, however, I think of them as loose
guidelines, not absolute rules. No set of rules ever works perfectly
in all situations... that would require pretty heavy AI. We need to
use best judgement, and refer to HIG whenever possible.
 
> I expect there will be a lot of new interfaces that need to be designed
> for 4.4, so ideas about that are more than welcome.
> 
>         Jasper
> 

Awesome. Where could I get some information about things that need to
be thought about?

One thing I think needs a lot of work is the default settings of Xfce.
They could definitely be a lot better, I'll make some reccomendations
along with the reasoning for them.

This will be fun!



Sincerely,

Joe Crawford
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