Some of you may know that I prefer Gnome to KDE and especially GTK to Qt. I like minimalism in my desktop. I actually run Blackbox rather than either KDE or Gnome so the GTK/Qt issue is more interesting than the general DE one. I love the clean look of the gtk default icons compared to the Qt version, especially the stock Gtk2 icons vs. KDE crystal for example.
An application I use quite alot is OpenOffice. The general interface to Oo isn’t the best I’ve seen. It gets the job done, but not in the nicest or neatest way and doesn’t tend to be an example of a ’transparent’ interface. So it made me quite excited to see that Ximian is contributing to the OpenOffice project to iron out some of the UI issues. Now, this is good for me as they are porting the gui to Gtk. This may displease the Qt lovers in this world, but it makes me very happy. OpenOffice is the only application (aside from Opera, which uses Qt but is such a good browser I can overlook it!) that I use that isn’t Gtk (aside from text editors), which sometimes is a distraction when working with apps. Also, the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines would make OpenOffice more usable in a stroke if they were applied consistently across the program.
From the slide show available at the Ximian site, it looks like much progress has been made in regard to the UI aswell as the underlying integration with the rest of the Ximian suite, which I would guess is a major aim for them.
I hope OpenOffice accepts the Ximian changes into the main build process, or that Ximian make available their own flavour of OpenOffice, as that would make my desktop even more kawaii*!
- kawaii = cute