[OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo style

[Steven M. Ottens]

Hi all,

My coding days are over, it seems that almost everybody within the  
OSGeo community is a better coder than me. This in itself is not a  
problem, it mainly means that the general codingskill is high within  
our community (or at least I hope it is ;) But personally it gives me  
a lack of purpose. This personal rambling is of no interest to you  
all I presume, but I've discovered something which I think might be  
of interest to the entire OSGeo community.
I've been more a designer than a coder from the first moment I  
touched a computer and I noticed that within the OSGeo community  
there are many coders but not many designers (interface, graphical,  
whatever). We as a community produce a series of of superb  
applications but they all use their own buttons and have their own  
behavior. There is no "osgeo look 'n feel". Still many applications  
have similar functions and similar buttons, which all look different  
and sometimes behave different. This makes it difficult to move from  
one application to another or to combine multiple applications.
Within the broader open source community this problem has been  
acknowledged already, resulting in the tango project: http:// 
tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery they have a basic set of  
rules and aim to create a set of icons which can be used by all  
desktop applications, being GNOME/KDE/Whatever.

So my proposal is to use the Tango-set for our applications and  
create a GIS superset for our specific needs. If there are projects  
interested in this idea I'm happy to start working on this.

Steven