Tango project announced

> 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!

APPEAL and Tango are two completely different projects (although both cover artwork and even icons). IIRC currently there are about three Novell employees involved with APPEAL (which equals almost 20% of the core people involved). As KDE and GNOME core developers tend to be very loyal about their ideas and project I'm quite sure there's hardly anything to worry about.

Concerning Tango: The good thing about Tango is that it already uses the common icon names from freedesktop.org which can be truely shared across desktops. This is clearly a concept which will be shared by all future iconthemes as well (including KDE 4's default iconset "Oxygen"). The result is a desktop which gives a much more consistent look and feel for the user and iconthemes that are easier to develop, no matter whether the icontheme is named "Tango", "Oxygen" or anything else. Now we only need to manage to create suggestions for common metaphors for all the iconnames. That way we can pull the whole icontheme thing to enterprise level. People who offer support or write documentation will be able to say stuff like:

" To select this part of the screen press the select-icon -- the one with the LASSO depicted"

.. and they can be 100% sure that as long as the icontheme is an enterprise icontheme (opposed to a fun theme) it _will_ depict a lasso -- no matter which icontheme is chosen. There will always be different iconthemes around as many projects, many distributors and even many free and commercial applications are promoting their own default iconset (think of Linspire's Clear-e, Redhat's Bluecurve, etc. who try to promote their own corporate identity).

And if we manage to get a specification out which gives advice to depict a certain metaphor for each iconname and if we manage that all companies and all projects involved will follow this spec then we have accomplished another big step with regards to iconthemes in enterprise environments. Then we do not only have a consistent icontheme experience across toolkits but also a situation where people who offer support, who write documentation etc. don't have to worry about the icontheme installed.

Torsten Rahn