Tango Project aims to simplify, beautify Linux desktops

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Oct. 12, 2005

Web designers Jakub Steiner of Novell Inc. and Steven Garrity of the Mozilla Visual Identity team this week introduced the Tango Project, a collaborative effort on the part of a variety of software designers and artists to unify the visual style of software on Linux and other open-source desktops.

The two Web developers made the announcement at the Gnome Summit in Boston.

"We've been working on it for a few months now, just getting the basics figured out before we started bragging," Garrity wrote on ActsofVolition.com.

To start, Garrity said, the two have collected the following:

Base Icon Library -- "Most of the work here has been done by Jakub Steiner," Garrity said. "It's a beautiful icon set that aims to be relatively at home on Windows, Mac OS X, and define a strong base style for the Linux desktop."
Style Guide -- A work in progress, the Tango style guide works to create a color scheme and other key visual guidelines for creating Tango-style icons, Garrity said.
Standard Icon Naming Specification -- "Rodney Dawes has done much of the work to get a common icon naming specification to make it possible to create an icon theme that can work on a variety of different platforms (Gnome, KDE, etc.)," Garrity said. "There are utilities to map the new Tango icons to the existing icon names on current Gnome and KDE systems."

The Tango Project says it hopes to eventually provide:

A specified default native look
A subsystem to help standardize toolkits on a common look and feel
A complete, standard set of application, mimetype, and stock icons to build upon a style guide
Cross-desktop humane interface guidelines

"There are 84 icons currently in the theme, and [a] couple hundred specified currently in the naming specification," Dawes wrote in his blog.

Part of a trend

The last two weeks have seen a rising level of interest in making Linux and other open-source desktops more intuitive to use, and attractive to users.

On Monday, Novell announced its Better Desktop initiative that provides open source developers with usability testing data and resources aimed at making Linux desktop applications a more comfortable fit for users. The material includes more than 200 video clips of Linux users bumbling their way through unfamiliar computer interfaces, Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open source products said.

Last week, Mozilla launched its DevMo site, which offers product news, discussion, and the code, tools, and documentation needed to build better websites and applications.

Visit the Tango Project here.

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