Random pixels

Myself, Carlos and Hagen attended FSCons (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) this weekend and on Sunday I did a talk on the Tango Project.

As we all know by now, “The Tango Project is nothing less than an attempt to impose Gnome’s bland aesthetics on all other desktop environments.” [1], and the KDE artists decided to define their own look and feel as part of their visual refresh for KDE4.
This, at the time made me a bit worried, as having the other big desktop not buying into the idea of a cross-desktop look and feel makes things slightly harder for your friend the application developer to the point where he almost decides not to do any visual integration to with your free desktop at all.

Looking at the recent work on the smaller sizes on Oxygen and the work on bigger sizes in Tango, it turns out that perhaps my worries was for no reason though. [2]

So, I showed this to my girlfried. It turns out she couldn’t spot the difference between the styles. But ok, fair enough, she’s not used to looking and these, and might not spot the important differences. But what about the audience at my talk, who are used to staring at these graphical elements all day long?
Sorry guys, it turns out they guessed wrong in about 50% of the cases. Good news for ISV/ISD’s though I guess!

1. From the old “throw this stuff out now please”-thread on freedesktop.org
2. To be honest, sneaky as we are, we have been working on lowering the gaps between the styles. Sorry for that.