[ros-general] ReactOS UI Team - Concept, Plan, and: help wanted

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think i quite understand this...Are you saying we should develop 
a new UI?  I don't think so. The Windows UI is standard, and several 
million users KNOW this UI.  Our UI should be kept as close as possible 
to windows without breaking any laws. 

Aleksey Bragin wrote:

> Hi, our UI Team Coordinator - mf - asked me to sent this email on his 
> behalf, because unfortunately mails from his address doesn't reach any 
> mailing-list.
>
> Here is the original message:
> *From: *mf <mf at mufunyo.net <mailto:mf at mufunyo.net>>
> *Date: *October 6, 2005 1:20:56 AM GMT+04:00
> *Subject: **ReactOS UI Team - Concept, Plan, and: help wanted*
>
>
> Greetings ReactOS developers and interested parties!
>
> For the unintroduced, I am your humble UI coordinator. In addition, I 
> also made some graphics for the project.
>
> -Concept-
> I am here to remind you of a post that was made in the ReactOS user 
> forum, written by crappish (Mikko Tikkanen). In it the author wrote of 
> the need of a consistent user interface, the need of people that 
> actually have knowledge of such things, and how these people would 
> have to be in charge of enforcing such an interface. They should be 
> familiar with Windows, know how to make things accessible and 
> newbie-friendly, and have enough creativity to improve on existing 
> concepts. In addition to that, there should be someone who represents 
> this team and can interface it with the rest of the project, and make 
> sure everything is the way everyone wants it to be. Now, this 
> representative has been chosen. But there is no team to back him up!
>
> -Recruiting-
> So getting down to business. The UI team is recruiting two kinds of 
> people.
> Primarily: Programmers who have sufficient knowledge to hack other 
> people's code, even if said code is rooted deeply in system libraries. 
> Skill in writing user interfaces and piecing together dialog 
> resources. No advanced skills beyond that required. This is most 
> important, since developers in this category can get straight to 
> business and get started on improving ReactOS.
> Secondarily: Interface concept designers who have advanced knowledge 
> of human interfacing, easy access, logical positioning, and the 
> creativity to improve and expand on existing ideas. This is a 
> secondary category because a) right now there is little to do in this 
> respect, b) there are already two (counting Mikko?) of these people in 
> ReactOS, and c) for every 1 concept designer, there can be up to 10 
> implementing developers.
> Even more appreciated, would be someone who fits both gloves and can 
> write code AND design interfaces. Sadly, experience proves that these 
> two traits don't usually come together in one person.
>
> And! Just as important, though not actively recruited, I welcome icon 
> designers, graphic designers, font designers (that includes you, 
> wierd_w!), sound effect samplers, and programmers willing to implement 
> missing UI features (think of things such as extended cursor/icon 
> support, alpha blitting, runtime freetype configuration, recycle bin 
> functionality, control panel, autorun support, etc), on individual 
> application (mail me at mf at mufunyo.net <mailto:mf at mufunyo.net>).
>
> -Plan-
> The plan(tm) to kickstart the UI team is as follows:
> Our first goal will be to make the surface experience of ReactOS 
> familiar. Surface in this context means the things a user will see 
> during and after bootup. This mainly involves modifying explorer; to 
> display a consistent and familiar start menu, and to show a friendly 
> explorer when My Computer or the Explore link is opened. This means 
> making all the surface icons consistent (my task), modifying 
> explorer's interface (the 'programmer' category), and figuring out the 
> best layout for the start menu (the 'designer' category).
> There is no plan past this first task, because I cannot predict how 
> small or big the team is going to be, what feedback we are going to 
> get, and how fast things will move.
>
>
>
> And that's it for my first big announcement. I hope this will get some 
> discussion going, and some balls rolling. I would also like to take 
> this  opportunity to request a mailing list for the UI team, this 
> should have been set up right after the coordinator vote was over, but 
> it wasn't-- so to whoever's in charge of that, I count on you. Thanks.
> Please reply to this mail only on the general list or to me in person 
> (if you're not on the list and only get digests), it is only 
> crossposted in ros-dev to get a wider range of attention.
>
>
> Thanks for reading,
> mf.
>
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