Tango project announced

As (currently) the main HIG contributor, I was as surprised as anyone to see Tango announced, which is a little unfortunate :) Clearly there is a mis-match between the HIG and Tango, but I don't think that's really a big problem-- the HIG is long overdue for an update anyway, and if Tango is well-received and officially incoporated into GNOME, I don't think there would be any problem incorporating the updated palette and icon design guidlelines into it.

I see no KDE people in Tango contributors. I believe they were as surprised as you on announcement. How they are supposed to create consistent looking desktops if they were not invited?
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:wq

While some KDE people might have been surprised by Tango I seriously doubt that the "KDE people that matter" in this case were! Here are some observations.
In the KDE world the Appeal artists now have total control over all of the artwork and develop it all behind closed doors. So if you want to get anywhere with "KDE art" in Tango you need to contact the Appeal artists as they are now the first and last word on the KDE art subject.
The possible surprise for the Tango devs may be that in order to get in contact with the lead artist that heads up the "Appeal(KDE) project art" all they will have to do is cross the hall from the Novell offices to the Suse offices.
Yup both Tango and Appeal are in part or whole?(not sure which) Novell projects. Now add to that Novell owns Xemian! Here are the questions that need to be asked. What % of a D.E. is graphics? And what % of Gnome and KDE does Novell now control? I mean you gotta hand it to Novell... literally!

While some KDE people might have been surprised by Tango I seriously doubt that the "KDE people that matter" in this case were!

The grandparent poster was correct. Neither the KDE mailing lists nor the main KDE artwork mailing list have been contacted. KDE has not been part of the discussion of creating such a common icon standard, and in general KDE developers don't like it if people name their own ideas a "standard" without discussing the ideas first with the projects that are supposed to implement this.

Yup both Tango and Appeal are in part or whole?(not sure which) Novell projects.

That's wrong. Only 3 or 4 of the 16 Appeal members work for SuSE. And if Novell tries to force this idea onto KDE without asking KDE beforehand whether they are interested in it at all, then the reaction by the KDE developer and artist community will be extremely negative.

That doesn't mean that the idea of a joint icon standard is a bad idea, but since the KDE Artists have never been contacted about this, they had no chance to give feedback on the idea itself or on implementation details.

Tango looks great! I don't understand what GNOME artists are taking, they need to be on heavy things to pull this off. Now I finally know what the password-protected section "Tango", in jimmac's archive, is.

I have to admit that I didn't read up what Tango really are trying to do to 100%. But I've checked dot.kde.org twice from now and see if they've covered the Tango project. Isn't this intresting for KDE too?

And if the things you say about Novell is true, I don't understand why the "Appeal project art" isn't involved as well.

And I just have to say that if it weren't for companies like Eazel, Novell, Ximian, Red Hat etc. the graphics in GNOME wouldn't have matured this fast.

The artwork is just a small peice of what Appeal aims to be. So they have a seperate agenda all thier own. From what I have seen they are not very community friendly so that may explain why they are not and probably will not work with Tango.

It is all about big business and finding ways to control the DE makes good business sense especially for a Linux vendor. The great challenge for the vendors that you have mentioned has always been how to control without violating a license. This is why we now have "Fedora", instead of a free "Red Hat" and "Open Suse" instead of free Suse etc...

I think the question about percentage is close but it needs to have a question added. What % of the art for either project is using an established tried and true open source license? If they both are then who care who funds it.

> So they have a seperate agenda all thier own. From what I have
> seen they are not very community friendly so that may explain
> why they are not and probably will not work with Tango.

Appeal is an open project. We have an open mailing list where people can subscribe and take part in discussion. And we currently have a lot of people who get interested in Appeal and shared their ideas. So if you have some ground breaking thought's feel free to share them with us :-)
If you are aiming for creating visions and new ideas then usually it's best practice to take just a few people who feel excited about their own ideas and about their own new concepts and put them into a tiny silent room where they can brainstorm - maybe with a glass of wine. Think of the "Behind the scenes" section in Nemo. If you were to create the storyboard of a successful movie how many people would get involved with the real work? Our strategy is similar: have a small lean think-tank of highly motivated people and give them a low-noise environment where they can develop their ideas.
With regard to being community-friendly and open this means walking the tightrope: On one hand we we want to keep the community involved and on the other hand we want to provide a low-noise environment for the people involved.
If you have some suggestions how to improve the situation feel free to share them with us. :-)

Torsten Rahn , APPEAL Desktop Project

I have no problems with the Tango style. The style looks close enough to the official GNOME icon style. I doubt most people can see the difference in style anyway.

The mozilla foundation has copyright restrictions on the orange icon and you cannot use it for customized builds (i.e. fedora compiled rpm's, ubuntu debs), that's why it is different for the distribution shipped versions of firefox.

(The reason is support related IIRC, i.e. Mozilla can only fully support the official builds, not every tweaked or patched version available)