Tag: Design

Rethinking Window Management

Window management is one of those areas I’m fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody’s fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we’ve relied on the window metaphor as the primary way of multitasking on the desktop. In this metaphor, each app can spawn one or more rectangular windows, which are stacked by most recently used, and moved or resized manually.

Overlapping windows can get messy quickly

The traditional windowing system works well as long as you only have a handful of small windows, but issues emerge as soon the number and size of the windows grows. As new windows are opened, existing ones are obscured, sometimes completely hiding them from view. Or, when you open a maximized window, suddenly every other window is hidden.

Over the decades, different OSes have added different tools and workflows to deal with these issues, including workspaces, taskbars, and switchers. However, the basic primitives have not changed since the 70s and, as a result, the issues have never gone away.

While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It’s also what we jokingly refer to as shit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose.

Most of the time you don’t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that’s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it’s two or three windows next to each other. It’s incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it’s up to you to clean it up.

What about tiling?

Traditional tiling window managers solve the hidden window problem by preventing windows from overlapping. While this works well in some cases, it falls short as a general replacement for stacked, floating windows. The first reason for this is that tiling window managers size windows according to the amount of available screen space, yet most apps are designed to be used at a certain size and aspect ratio. For example, chat apps are inherently narrow and end up having large amounts of empty space at large sizes. Similarly, reading a PDF in a tiny window is not fun.

GNOME 44 with the “Forge” tiling extension. Just because windows can be tall and narrow doesn’t mean they should be :)

Another issue with tiling window manager is that they place new windows in seemingly arbitrary positions. This is a consequence of them not having knowledge about the content of a window or the context in which it is being used, and leads to having to manually move or resize windows after the fact, which is exactly the kind of fiddling we want to avoid in the first place.

More constrained tiling window managers such as on iPadOS are interesting in that they’re more purposeful (you always intentionally create the tiling groups). However, this approach only allows tiling two windows side-by-side, and does not scale well to larger screens.

History

This topic has been of interest to the design team for a very long time. I remember discussing it with Jakub at my first GUADEC in 2017, and there have been countless discussions, ideas, and concepts since. Some particular milestones in our thinking were the concept work leading up to GNOME 40 in 2019 and 2020, and the design sessions at the Berlin Mini GUADEC in 2022 and the Brno hackfest in 2023.

Tiling BoF in Brno during the HDR hackfest. Left to right: Robert Mader, Marco Trevisan, Georges Stavracase, Jakub Steiner and Allan Day (remote), Florian Müllner, Jonas Dreßler

I personally have a bit of a tradition working on this problem for at least a few weeks per year. For example, during the first lockdown in 2020 I spent quite a bit of time trying to envision a tiling-first version of GNOME Shell.

2020 mockup for a tiling-first GNOME Shell. More mockups in the OS mockups repo on Gitlab.

Problems with our current tiling

GNOME has had basic tiling functionality since early in the GNOME 3 series. While this is nice to have, it has obvious limitations:

  • It’s completely manual
  • Only 2 windows are supported, and the current implementation is not extensible to more complex layouts
  • Tiled windows are not grouped in the window stack, so both windows are not raised simultaneously and other windows get in the way
  • Workspaces are manual, and not integrated into the workflow
Because tiled windows are currently mixed with overlapping floating windows they’re not really helping make things less messy in practice.

We’ve wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting!

Get out of my way

The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don’t want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn’t solve the problems the majority of people face.

To do this we landed on a number of high level ideas:

  • Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed
  • Make use of workspaces as a fully integrated part of the workflow
  • Richer metadata from apps to allow for better integration

Our current concept imagines windows having three potential layout states:

  • Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating
  • Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge
  • Floating, the classic stacked windows model

Mosaic is the default behavior. You open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app. For a web browser that might be maximized, for a weather app maybe only 700×500 pixels.

As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn’t fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled.

You can also manually tile windows. If there’s enough space, other windows are left in a mosaic layout. However, if there’s not enough space for this mosaic layout, you’re prompted to pick another window to tile alongside.

You’re not limited to tiling just two windows side by side. Any tile (or the remaining space) can be split by dragging another window over it, and freely resized as the window minimum sizes allow.

There are always going to be cases that require placing a window in a specific position on the screen. The new system allows windows to be used with the classic floating behavior, on a layer above the mosaic/tiling windows. However, we think that this floating behaviour is going to be a relatively uncommon, similar to the existing “always on top” behavior that we have today.

There’s of course much more to this, but hopefully this gives an idea of what we have in mind in terms of behavior.

New window metadata

As mentioned above, to avoid the pitfalls of traditional tiling window managers we need more information from windows about their content. Windows can already set a fixed size and they have an implicit minimum size, but to build a great tiling experience we need more.

Some apps should probably never be maximized/tiled on a 4K monitor…

One important missing piece is having information on the maximum desired size of a window. This is the size beyond which the window content stops looking good. Not having this information is one of the reasons that traditional tiling window managers have issues, especially on larger screens. This maximum size would not be a hard limit and manual resizing would still be possible. Instead, the system would use the maximum size as one factor when it calculates an optimal window layout. For example, when tiling to the side of the screen, a window would only grow as wide as its maximum width rather than filling exactly half of the screen.

In addition, it’d be helpful to know the range of ideal sizes where an app works best. While an app may technically work at mobile sizes that’s probably not the best way to use that app if you have a large display. To stay with our chat example, you probably want to avoid folding the sidebar if it can be avoided, so the range of ideal sizes would be between the point where it becomes single pane and its maximum usable size.

Ideally these properties could be set dynamically depending on the window content. For example, a spreadsheet with a lot of columns but few rows could have a wider ideal size than one with lots of rows.

Depending on apps using new system APIs can be challenging and slow — it’s not easy to move the entire ecosystem! However, we think there’s a good chance of success in this case, due to the simplicity and universal usefulness of the API.

Next steps

At the Brno hackfest in April we had an initial discussion with GNOME Shell developers about many of the technical details. There is tentative agreement that we want to move in the direction outlined in this post, but there’s still a lot of work ahead.

On the design side, the biggest uncertainty is the mosaic behavior — it’s a novel approach to window management without much prior art. That’s exciting, but also makes it a bit risky to jump head-first into implementation. We’d like to do user research to validate some of our assumptions on different aspects of this, but it’s the kind of project that’s very difficult to test outside of an actual prototype that’s usable day to day.

If you’d like to get involved with this initiative, one great way to help out would be to work on an extension that implements (parts of) the mosaic behavior for testing and refining the interactions. If you’re interested in this, please reach out :)

There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage, but it’s definitely 46+ material and likely to take multiple cycles. There are individual parts of this that could be worked on independently ahead of the more contingent pieces, for example tiling groups or new window metadata. Help in any of these areas would be appreciated.

This post is summarizing collaborative work over the past years by the entire design team (Allan Day, Jakub Steiner, Sam Hewitt, et al). In particular, thanks to Jakub for the awesome animations bringing the behaviors to life!

Berlin Mini GUADEC 2022

Given the location of this year’s GUADEC many of us couldn’t make it to the real event (or didn’t want to because of the huge emissions), but since there’s a relatively large local community in Berlin and nearby central Europe, we decided to have a new edition of our satellite event, to watch the talks together remotely.

This year we were quite a few more people than last year (a bit more than 20 overall), so it almost had a real conference character, though the organization was a lot more barebones than a real event of course.

Thanks to Sonny Piers we had c-base as our venue this year, which was very cool. In addition to the space ship interior we also had a nice outside area near the river we could use for COVID-friendly hacking.

The main hacking area inside at c-base

We also had a number of local live talks streamed from Berlin. Thanks to the people from c-base for their professional help with the streaming setup!

On Thursday I gave my talk about post-collapse computing, i.e. why we need radical climate action now to prevent a total catastrophe, and failing that, what we could do to make our software more resilient in the face of an ever-worsening crisis.

Unfortunately I ran out of time towards the end so there wasn’t any room for questions/discussion, which is what I’d been looking forward to the most. I’ll write it up in blog post form soon though, so hopefully that can still happen asynchronously.

Hacking outside c-base on the river side

Since Allan, Jakub, and I were there we wanted to use the opportunity to work on some difficult design questions in person, particularly around tiling and window management. We made good progress in some of these areas, and I’m personally very excited about the shape this work is taking.

Because we had a number of app maintainers attending we ended up doing a lot of hallway design reviews and discussions, including about Files, Contacts, Software, Fractal, and Health. Of course, inevitably there were also a lot of the kinds of cross-discipline conversations that can only happen in these in-person settings, and which are often what sets the direction for big things to come.

One area I’m particularly interested in is local-first and better offline support across the stack, both from a resilience and UX point of view. We never quite found our footing in the cloud era (i.e. the past decade) because we’re not really set up to manage server infrastructure, but looking ahead at a local-first future, we’re actually in a much better position.

The Purism gang posing with the Librem 5: Julian, Adrien, and myself

For some more impressions, check out Jakub’s video from the event.

Thanks to everyone for joining, c-base for hosting, the GNOME Foundation for financial support for the event, and hopefully see you all next year!

Drawing GNOME App Mockups

I’ve written about designing GNOME apps at a high level before, but not about the actual process of drawing UI mockups the way we do on the GNOME design team. In this tutorial we’ll pick up the Read It Later example from previous tutorials again, and draw some mockups in Inkscape from scratch.

Before we start, let’s look at the sketches we’re going to base this on. I’ve re-drawn some of the sketches from my last app design blog post with just the parts we’ll need for this tutorial.

I recommend having a look at that other blog post before jumping into this one, as it will give you some background on the basic design patterns and show step by step how we got to this layout.

What’s in a Mockup?

After you’ve designed the basic structure of your app (e.g. as a sketch on paper) but before starting implementation, it’s good to check what your layout will look like with real UI elements.

Left: The initial mockup drawn in Inkscape, right: Screenshot of the real app

This doesn’t mean mockups need to recreate every gradient and highlight from the GTK stylesheet. Doing that would make mockups very hard to edit and keep in sync as the stylesheet evolves. However, things like spacing, border radii, button styling, etc. can be made to look very close to how they’ll look in the implemented version with relatively little effort. This is why on the GNOME design team we use a simplified style somewhere between a wireframe and a mockup, where sizes and metrics are mostly pixel-perfect, but UI visuals are not.

This level of fidelity is great for trying variations on layouts, placement of individual controls, different icon metaphors, etc. which are the most important things to validate before starting development. Once the implementation is in progress there’s usually additional rounds of iteration on different aspects of the design, but those don’t always require mockups as you can just iterate directly in code at that point.

Pre-Requisites

In order to be able to follow along with this tutorial, you’ll need to install a few apps:

  • Inkscape: The vector drawing app we’ll be using to draw our mockup
  • Icon Library: A handy app for finding symbolic icons to use in mockups

Next, you need the GNOME mockup template. This is an SVG file with many of our most common UI patterns, which enables you to make mockups by copying and adapting these existing components, rather than having to draw every element yourself. You can download the template from GNOME Gitlab.

Finally, you need a recent version of Cantarell, GNOME’s interface font. It’s possible that while you may have a font with that name installed, it’s not the right version, because some distributions and Google Fonts are still on an old version (which has only 2 weights, rather than 5). You can download the new version here.

Inkscape Basics

If you’ve never used Inkscape before it might be good to do some more general beginner tutorials as a first step. I’ll assume familiarity with navigation and object manipulation primitives such as selection, moving/scaling/rotating, duplicating, manipulating z-index, grouping/ungrouping, and navigating through group hierarchies.

Nevertheless, here’s a quick overview of the features we’ll be using primarily.

Controls

Inkscape has a lot of features, but we only need a small subset for what we’re doing. Most interfaces are just nested rectangles, after all ;)

Toolbox (the toolbar on the left edge):

  • Selection/movement/scaling tool (S)
  • Rectangle tool (R)
  • Ellipse tool (E)
  • Text tool (T)
  • Color picker (D)

Properties Sidebar (configuration dialogs docked to the right side):

  • Fill & Stroke (Ctrl + Shift + F)
  • Align & Distribute (Ctrl + Shift + A)
  • Export (Ctrl + Shift + E)
  • Document Properties (Ctrl + Shift + D)

Snap Controls (the toolbar on the right edge): Inkscape has very fine-grained snapping controls to configure what should be snapped to when you move items on the canvas (e.g. path nodes, object center, path intersections). It’s a bit fiddly, but very useful for making sure things are aligned to the grid. The icon tooltips are your friends :)

When aligning things or working with the pixel grid it’s very helpful to have the page grid visible. It can be toggled with the # shortcut or in the View menu.

Advanced: Partial Rounded Corners

One sort of advanced thing I started doing recently is using path effects to get rounded corners only on specific corners of a rectangle. This is handy compared to having the rounding baked into the geometry, because it keeps the rounding flexible, so the object can be scaled without affecting the rounded corners.

The feature is quite hidden and looks very complex, but once you know where it is it’s not that scary. You can find it in Path > Path Effects... > + > Corners (Fillet/Chamfer).

You’ll find that the mockup templates use this path effect technique for e.g. rounded bottom corners on windows.

Color Palette

It’s not as important for mockups as it is for app icons, but still nice to have: The GNOME color palette. Inkscape 1.0+ includes it by default, so you can just choose it from the arrow menu on the right.

Otherwise you can also get it via the dedicated color palette app, or download the .gpl from Gitlab and put it in ~/.var/app/org.inkscape.Inkscape/config/inkscape/palettes for Flatpak Inkscape or ~/.config/inkscape/palettes if it’s on the host.

Page Setup

With that out of the way, let’s get started making our mockup! First, we need a basic page to start from. We can start from the empty-page.svg file, by opening that file and saving it under the name we’ll ultimately want for our mockup, e.g. read-later.svg.

GNOME mockups usually consist of one or more views laid out on a “page” of whatever size is needed to make the content fit. There’s usually a title and description at the top, plus additional captions to explain things about the individual screens where it’s needed (example).

The page dimensions can be adjusted in Document Properties (Ctrl + Shift + D). One useful shortcut here is Ctrl+Shift+R, which resizes to the bounding box of the current selection (Note: Only use this shortcut if the thing you’re resizing to is e.g. a rectangle you set up for that purpose. Resizing the page to things off the pixel grid will break it, because it moves the document origin).

Let’s do that, and tweak the title and description for our case:

Desktop View

Now that the page is set up we can add our first screen. This is the sketch we’re going to be drawing first:

As a first step, let’s bring in the window template with view switcher from pattern-templates.svg. Open that file in Inkscape, select the top leftmost screen, copy it, and paste it into your mockup file.

After roughly positioning the window, check the exact position using the numeric position entries in the bar at the top, and make sure both X and Y positions are full integers (if they’re not integers it means your mockup is off the pixel grid and will look blurry).

It’s worth pointing out that while in this case we’re just starting from the plain default templates, it’s often faster to start from an existing mockup for another app. The app-mockups repository on GNOME Gitlab is full of existing mockups to borrow elements from or use as a starting point for a new mockup. That said, depending on their age those mockups might be using outdated patterns, so it’s good to check when a particular mockup was last updated :)

Headerbar

Let’s start by adjusting the headerbar to what we have in our sketch. Conveniently, several of the buttons don’t need to change at all from the template. All we need to do here is move the search button to the left, delete the add button, and adjust the switcher.

As a general rule, spacing between elements is a multiple of 6 pixels (so 6, 12, 18, 24…). For example, there are 6px of padding around buttons inside a headerbar, and 6px between the individual buttons.

When moving/placing elements, always make sure that snapping to bounding box is active (topmost group of snapping controls). As with the placement of the window earlier, it’s good to verify that sizes and positions are even integers in the toolbar up top.

Next up: The view switcher. You can start by changing the three labels, and then re-centering the icon + label groups on their respective containers. The inactive items have invisible containers, so they’re a bit fiddly to select.

For the icons, you can fire up Icon Library and search for the following icons:

  • Unread: view-paged
  • Archive: drawer *
  • Favorites: star-outline-thick

* This icon isn’t included yet, but will be in a future version

You can paste icons directly into Inkscape using the “Copy to Clipboard” feature. Before pasting, navigate into the relevant icon group (each of the icons is grouped with an invisible 16px rectangle, because that’s the icon canvas size). When placing an icon, make sure to center it on the invisible canvas rectangle, and place them on the pixel grid. You may want to turn on outline mode (Ctrl+5 cycles through display modes) to deal with the invisible rectangles more easily.

Once the icons are replaced, change the label strings with the text tool, and move the icon+label blocks horizontally so they look centered within their containers. I personally just do this manually by eye rather than using the alignment tool, so I don’t lose the icon’s alignment to the pixel grid, but you can also align and then manually move it to the closest position on the pixel grid.

With this, the headerbar is complete now:

Content

Let’s look at the content inside the window next. We can keep the basic structure of the listbox from the template, but obviously we want to change what’s in the list.

I’ve prepared some example content we can just copy and paste that into our mockup. Each article consists of three labels, one using the regular font size (10.5pt), and two using the small one (9pt). The metadata label also uses a lighter gray, to distinguish it from the body copy (you can get the color from the labels on the right side of the list in the template using the color picker tool).

The list from the template is grouped and has a clipping mask to cut off scrolling content at the bottom. Since our layout is different anyway we can remove the clipping by simply ungrouping (Ctrl + Shift + G). Next, we can delete all content except the first row, and change that to our first article.

In order to accommodate multiple pieces of content inline as part of the same label, a common pattern is to use middle dots (“·”) as dividers. Pro tip: The Typography app makes it easy to copy and paste typographic symbols like this one into your mockups.

After adding the articles in the first listbox, we need the “Show more” button at the bottom. For that we can just resize the list so it extends past the last article, and add a centered label on that area.

Some of the articles also have images associated with them (there are download URLs for the images in the example content file). Images that aren’t already square need to be clipped to a square shape for our layout. To do that in Inkscape

  • Pull in the image via drag and drop from the file manager (or paste it directly from a website via “Copy Image”)
  • Place a rectangle with the right size/proportions where we want the image to go in the layout. In this case, images should be 80px squares, with 12px spacing all around.
  • Move and scale the image to cover the rectangle on all sides
  • Select both the image and the rectangle, and do Object > Clip > Set. Note that the clipping object (the rectangle) needs to be above the target (the image).
Left: semi-transparent clipping rectangle overlaying image, right: clipped image

With the first list done, we can move it down a bit and add a title above it. You can re-use one of the titles from the list for that, and just horizontally align it with the list container. Spacing between title baseline and list should also be 12px, and above the title 18px to the edge of the view.

After that, our first list is complete:

For the second list we can duplicate our first list, move it down below, and just change the content:

In order to have it cut off nicely at the bottom we can bring back a clipping mask. Group the list, duplicate the window background rectangle, and use that as a clipping mask for the list. To make the last article a little more visible I’m also resizing the window background to be a little bit taller first.

For the primary menu we can pretty much just re-use the menu from the template (top left, outside the canvas). Copy over the template popover and button, and vertically align it so the button is at the same height as the one in the window.

Since we don’t need many actions other than the default ones, all we need to do here is change a few labels, add another divider, and put in the name of the app.

That leaves us with a bunch of whitespace in the popover though, so let’s move up the actions and then resize the popover by selecting the bottom nodes and moving them up using the arrow keys:

And with that, our menu looks pretty good:

That completes our desktop view, and we can move on to mobile.

Mobile View

Now that we have a desktop view, let’s do a mobile version of it. Let’s have another look at our sketch:

We can re-use all the elements from the desktop view here, but we need to resize and move around a few things.

As a starting point for the layout, let’s bring in the mobile template. I like to align the mobile headerbar with the desktop one vertically, so all the headerbar buttons have the same vertical position.

Headerbar & Navigation

On mobile sizes there’s not enough horizontal space to keep the view switcher in the headerbar, so instead there’s just a title. The view switcher is in a separate bar at the bottom.

For the headerbar we can duplicate the buttons from the desktop mockup and use them to replace the placeholder buttons on the mobile template.

For the switcher, start by deleting all items except one. Then center the remaining one, and resize the background rectangle to a bit less than a third of the width of the view.

After that you can duplicate the item twice, and move the two additional switcher items to the sides:

Now you can change the icons and strings, and delete the backgrounds on two of the items, and we have a complete mobile switcher:

Content

Adapting the content is easy in this case. Duplicate the lists from the desktop mockup, left-align it with the lists from the template and delete the original lists.

Then we just need to resize the text boxes by moving the handle on the right of the baseline, truncate the text to two lines, move the images to 12px from the right edge, and center the “Show More” label.

Repeat the same thing for the second list, and we have a complete mobile layout!

Page Size & Export

If we zoom out and look at the whole thing together, we can see that this looks pretty much done now:

However, the canvas size is too big for the content we have. Open Document Properties (Ctrl + Shift + D) and change the size to about 1780×1100px.

This is what it looks like with the new page size:

Now that the mockup is ready, let’s export a PNG for easy sharing. Open the Export dialog (Ctrl+Shift+E), choose “Page” at the very top, make sure the DPI is 96, and set the file path. Then press Export, and try opening the PNG in an image viewer to check if there are any issues you missed.

On the design team we usually then push the finished mockup to a git repository, but that’s out of scope for this tutorial.

Conclusion

Congratulation, you made it all the way to the end! I hope this was useful, and you’ll go on to make many great mockups using what you learned :)

You can download the SVG for the mockup I created for this tutorial from GNOME Gitlab. It might come in handy if you have problems with a specific part of the tutorial and want to see how I did it. By the way: The inkscape-tutorial-resources repository contains snapshots of all templates and resources used in this tutorial, in case the original ones change in the future.

Obviously for a real mockup we’d do additional screens (e.g. the article page, various other menus, settings screens, and the like), but I think we’ve covered most of the basics with just this one screen. If you have questions feel free to comment or get in touch!

Designing an Icon for Your App

You’ve designed your app’s interface, and found the perfect name for it. But of course a great app also needs a great icon before you can release it to the world.

After the name, the app icon is the most important part of an app’s brand. The icon can help explain at a glance what the app does, and serves as an entry point to the rest of the experience. A high quality icon can make people want to use an app more, because it’s a stand-in for the quality of the entire app.

Think of the app icon like an album cover for your app. Yes, technically the music is the same even if you have a terrible cover, but a great cover can capture the spirit of the album and elevate the quality of the thing as a whole.

Metaphors

The first thing you need is a metaphor, i.e. some kind of physical object, symbol, or other visual artifact that symbolizes your application.

Finding a good metaphor is a fuzzy and sometimes difficult process, as it’s often hard to find a physical object many people will recognize as related to the domain of your app. There are no hard and fast rules for this, but ideally your icon metaphor should fall into one of these categories:

  • Physical objects directly related to what the app does (e.g. a speaker for Music)
  • Physical objects vaguely related to the app’s domain or an older analog version of it (e.g. a cassette tape for Podcasts)
  • Symbols related to the domain (e.g. the “play” triangle for Videos)
  • A simplified/stylized version of the app’s user interface (e.g. Peek)

The Music, Podcasts, Videos, and Peek icons

There are also anti-patterns for metaphors which should be avoided, if possible:

  • Heavily stylized symbols or logos (e.g. Fondo)
  • Completely random objects or symbols (e.g. Dino)
  • Mascots (e.g. GIMP)

These kinds of metaphors can work, but they make it harder to see at a glance what the app does, and don’t fit in as well with the rest of the system.

Let’s try an example: Remember the Reading List app we designed in a previous tutorial? Let’s make an icon for that!

My process for brainstorming metaphors is quite similar to the one I use to brainstorm names: I come up with a few ideas for physical objects, put them in a thesaurus to find more related ones, and repeat that until I have a list with at least a few viable candidates.

Let’s start with related physical objects:

  • Reading List
  • List
  • Book
  • Bookshelf
  • Article
  • Newspaper
  • Bookmark

How about related non-objects? Maybe we can find some more interesting objects that way:

  • Reading, the activity: Couch, reading light, tea/coffee, glasses
  • Later (as in, “read later”): Clock, timer
  • Collecting things: Folder, clipboard

Now that we have a few options, let’s see which ones are viable. Ideally, the metaphor you choose should have these attributes:

  • Somewhat specific to the app’s domain (e.g. a book is probably too generic in our case)
  • Recognizable at small sizes
  • Can be drawn in a simple, geometric style (this can save you a lot of work later on)

In this case, the most viable options are probably

  • Stack of books
  • Bookshelf
  • Bookmark
  • One of the above + a clock

Sketches

Now that we have some metaphors, let’s try to sketch them to see if they make for good icons. I usually use pencil and paper for this, but you can also use a whiteboard, digital drawing tablet, or whatever else works for you to quickly visualize some concepts.

There are also official sketching templates with the base icon shapes available for download.

While sketching it’s good to think about the overall shape your icon will have. If it makes sense for your metaphor, try to make the icon not just a simple square or circle, but something more unique and interesting. If it doesn’t make sense in your case don’t force it though, there are other ways to make the icon visually unique and interesting, such as color and structure.

In this case, it looks like there are a number of viable concepts among our sketches, though nothing jumps out as the obvious best option. I kind of like the bookshelf, so let’s try going forward with that one.

Start from a Template

We now have a concept we like, so we can move to vector. This is where we can start using the shiny new icon design tools!

The first step is to install App Icon Preview from Flathub. We’ll also need a vector editor that works well with SVG, such as Inkscape.

Open App Icon Preview, and hit the “New App Icon” button on the welcome screen. We’re asked for the Reverse Domain Name Notation name of the app (e.g. org.mozilla.Firefox), and where to store the icon project file.

In most cases you’ll want to keep this file in your app’s git repository. Think of it as your icon’s source file, which the final icon assets are later exported from.

After that, the icon will open in preview mode in App Icon Preview. Now we open the same file in a vector drawing app, and edit it from there. Every time we save the source file, the preview will automatically update.

Now we have our icon source file open in both App Icon Preview and Inkscape. Icon Preview shows just the icon grid:

In Inkscape, open the Layers panel (Ctrl + Shift + L) and check out the layer structure. The icons layer is where the actual icon goes. The grid and baseplate layers contain the icon grid and the canvas respectively.

Behind everything else is the template layer, which doesn’t contain anything visible and is only needed so App Icon Preview can get the canvas size for preview and export. Don’t change, hide, rename, or delete this layer, because the icon might not show up in App Icon Preview anymore.

When previewing the icon in App Icon Preview you’ll want to hide the grid and baseplate layers (using the little eye icon next to the layers).

Make sure you have the GNOME HIG Colors palette in Inkscape. Inkscape 1.0 Beta has it by default, otherwise you can download it from the HIG App Icons repository and put it in ~/.var/app/org.inkscape.Inkscape/config/inkscape/palettes for Flatpak Inkscape or ~/.config/inkscape/palettes if it’s on the host. There’s also a color palette app, which you can get on Flathub.

Inkscape Tips

Once you’re familiar with the template, you can start drawing your icon idea as vector. If you’re using Inkscape and aren’t very familiar with the app yet, here’s a quick overview of the things you’ll likely need.

Toolbox (the toolbar on the left edge)

  • Selection/movement/scaling tool (S)
  • Rectangle tool (R)
  • Ellipse tool (E)

And if you’re doing something a little more advanced:

  • Bezier path drawing tool (B)
  • Path & node editor (N)
  • Gradient editor

Dialogs Sidebar (configuration dialogs docked to the right side)

  • Fill & Stroke (Ctrl + Shift + F)
  • Align & Distribute (Ctrl + Shift + A)
  • Layers (Ctrl + Shift + L)

Snap Controls (the toolbar on the right edge) Inkscape has very fine-grained snapping controls, where you can configure what should be snapped to when you move items on the canvas (e.g. path nodes, object center, path intersections). It’s a bit fiddly, but very useful for making sure things are aligned to the grid. The icon tooltips are your friends :)

Of course, teaching Inkscape is a bit out of scope for this guide. If you’re just getting started with it, I recommend doing a few beginner tutorials first to familiarize yourself with the basic workflows (especially around the tools listed here).

The GNOME Icon Style

Traditionally, GNOME app icons were very complex, with lots of photorealistic detail and many different sizes which had to be drawn separately. This changed when we revamped the style in 2018, with the explicit goal of making it easier to produce, and more approachable for third party icon designers.

The new style is very geometric, so in many cases you can draw an entire icon with just basic shapes.

These icons consist of rectangles (some with rounded corners) and circles exclusively

Perspective

One important attribute of the style is the abstract perspective. Even though the style is simple and geometric, it’s not “flat”: It makes use of material, depth, and perspective, but in a way that is optimized for easy production as vector.

The perspective works by “folding” horizontal and vertical layers into one dimension, so you can see the object orthogonally from both the top and the front.

This results in a kind of “chin” an the bottom of the object, which is shaded darker than the top surface, since light comes evenly from the top/back.

The perspective is achieved by folding the top and front views together

In practice, this usually doesn’t have a huge impact, since it’s also suggested to make objects not too tall, when possible. A lot of icons are just a simple 2D shape with a small chin at the bottom.

That said, it can look very weird when you get the perspective wrong, e.g. by folding the layers from the top/back instead of the front, so it’s important to keep this in mind.

Material & Lighting

Icons can make use of skeuomorphic materials (e.g. wood, metal, or glass) if it’s needed for the physical metaphor, but outside of those special cases it’s recommended to keep things simple.

Examples of icons with realistic materials

Straight surfaces have flat colors (instead of e.g. slight vertical gradients), but curved surfaces can/should have gradients. The corners on the chin on rounded base shapes should have a highlight gradient.

The highlight on the corners of the chin is done with a horizontal gradient.

Shadows inside the icon should be avoided if possible, but can be used if necessary (e.g. for contrast reasons). Do not use drop shadows that affect the app outline though, because GTK renders such a shadow automatically.

Icon Grid & Standard Shapes

In order to make sure icons are somewhat similar in size, alignment, etc. we have a grid system.

The canvas is 128x128px (for legacy reasons), but you’re designing for 64×64, while also taking 32×32 into account where possible. In general, it’s good to make sure you’re putting as many lines as possible on grid lines, so they’re sharp even at 32. Testing in App Icon Preview helps a lot with this.

Each of the grid squares is 8×8 pixels. In order to be pixel-perfect at 64 and 32, orthogonal lines/edges should be on these grid lines (or fractions of them).

The icon grid also has some standard shapes for wide, tall, square, and circular icons, which can be used as a basis for the structure of the icon if it makes sense for the metaphor (e.g. if the object is more or less square, use the square standard shape).

Protip: Great Artists Steal Reuse

There are lots of apps with icons in the GNOME style out there, and they’re all free software. If there’s something you like about another app’s icon you can get the source from GNOME Gitlab or Github, look at how a certain object is drawn, or just take (parts of) other icons and adapt them to your needs.

This is especially useful for common objects needed in many icons, e.g. pencils, books, or screens. The icon template in App Icon Preview comes with a few of these common objects on the canvas, which can be a good starting point for new icons.

Draw, Preview, Repeat!

Armed with this knowledge about the style and tooling, we can finally jump in and start drawing! In this case I re-did the sketch at a slightly larger size to get a better feel for it:

Book shelf sketch

Now let’s try vectorizing it. Since the overall shape is a tall rectangle, we can start with the tall rectangle standard shape. If we change the color to brown, and make the chin at the bottom thicker (by resizing the top layer vertically), we have the basic frame for the shelf.

After that we can add the actual shelves, by simply adding two slightly darker brown rectangles (the back of the shelf), and two wide rectangles at the top of these (the bottom of the horizontal shelf).

Changing the color of the chin is a bit tricky, because it has a horizontal gradient. It requires selecting the bottom rectangle with the gradient tool, clicking each gradient stop manually and changing it to brown by clicking one of the colors in the color palette at the bottom edge of the window.

If you use e.g. Brown 3 from the palette for the top surface, you can use the Brown 4 or 5 for the chin, and Brown 2 or 3 for the highlights in the corners.

Let’s see what this looks like in Icon Preview now:

Getting there, right? Now let’s add some books. Lucky for us, book spines can also be drawn as rectangles, so this shouldn’t be too hard. We don’t want too much detail, because we’re designing for 64px first and foremost. Something like 10 books per row should work.

100% rectangles :)

If we want to get fancy we can also round the top of the spine on some of the books by adding an ellipse of the same color, but it’s not really needed at this size.

Finished full-color icon in App Icon Preview

Looking good! I think we’re done with the full-color icon.

If at this point in the process you feel like the concept or metaphor isn’t working out (for example because it doesn’t look interesting enough, or because it’s too complicated to work at small sizes) you can always go back a few steps and try vectorizing a different one of your sketches. The nice thing about the simplicity of this style is that you can do this without losing weeks of work, making iteration on concepts much more feasible.

Symbolic

Now that the full-color icon is done, we can start thinking about the symbolic icon for our app. Ideally this is a simplified, one-color version of the app icon, designed for a 16×16 px canvas. It’s used in notifications and some other places in the Shell where a colorful icon would not be appropriate.

I won’t go into too much detail on this here since drawing good symbolics is a big topic, and this post is too long already. I might expand on this in a future post, but for now here are a few quick tips:

  • Alignment to the pixel grid is very important here if you don’t want the icon to end up a blurry mess
  • Stick to the original metaphor if at all possible, go for something else if not
  • Test in App Icon Preview to make sure the icon is actually recognizable at 16px
  • If possible leave the outermost 1px empty on all sides
  • Most strokes should be 2px, but they can be 1px in some cases
  • Don’t overthink it for the first version. This icon is a secondary thing, and it’s relatively little effort to fix/redo it later :)

Our bookshelf example looks tricky at first glance, because we have all these tiny books, and only 16 pixels to work with. However, if we simplify it enough it’s not too hard to get something decent. We can just use a two tall and two wide rectangles to draw the shelf, and three smaller rectangles as books on each shelf:

This one is literally just rectangles :)

And that’s it! We have a real app icon now, with everything that entails. If you want to have a look at the source for the icon we made in this tutorial, you can download the SVG here. It includes the final icon and some of the intermediate steps.

Color and Symbolic in App Icon Preview

Export

Now that we’re happy with the icon, we can press the “Export” button in App Icon Preview and save the final icon assets. The app will automatically optimize the SVGs for size, and if you have nightly builds of your app, you also get an automatically generated nightly icon without any extra work!Export Popover in App Icon Preview

Congratulations for making it all the way to the end! I hope you found this tutorial useful, and will go on to make great icons for your apps. If there’s anything you found unclear while following along, please let me know in the comments.

If you’re looking for more resources on the topic, check out the Icons and Artwork HIG page, the official guide on making GNOME App Icons, and the Icon Design Workflow wiki page.

Happy hacking :)

Naming Your App

So you’ve decided to make a new app for GNOME, and designed a great interface for it. Now you want to start building it, so you open Gitlab to create a new repository. But then, oh no — it wants a name for the repository. Existential dread sets in.

Naming things is hard, and naming user-facing things is even more so. App names are read, pronounced, heard, and remembered by lots of people. The name is, along with the icon, the most important identifier for your project. With this tutorial I hope to make finding a great name for your app a bit easier.

General Guidance

As the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines put it:

“An application’s name is vital. It is what users will be first exposed to, and will help them decide whether they want to use an application or not. It is a major part of your application’s public face.”

Finding a good name is not always easy, but putting in a bit of effort up-front is worth it, because renaming the app once it’s established is much harder and messier.

A good name should:

  • Consist of one or two simple nouns
  • Be related to the app’s domain (e.g. Celluloid for a video app)
  • Be short (less than 15 characters)
  • Be easy to pronounce
  • Make it easy to come up with a good icon (e.g. by referencing a physical object that could be used as the icon)
  • Use title case (e.g. Icon Preview instead of iconPreview)

A good name should avoid:

  • Using trademarks or names of other projects (e.g. GNOME MPV)
  • Having a “G” prefix (e.g. GParted)
  • Overly complicated names and acronyms (e.g. GIMP)
  • Puns and inside jokes (e.g. D-Feet)
  • Non-standard punctuation or whitespace (e.g. UberWriter)
  • Made-up words or word combinations (e.g. Inkscape)

The Process

Over the years I’ve been involved with naming a lot of projects, and at this point I have a process which consistently produces pretty good results. It more or less goes like this:

  1. Write down all the words related to the app’s domain you can think of
  2. Do a thesaurus search for some of those words to find even more related words
  3. When you have about 15, start picking out some of the best-sounding ones, and look at their other qualities. Are they too long? Easy enough to pronounce? Do they have any unintended negative connotations?
  4. Once you have picked a handful of favorites, do a quick check to see if the names are already taken
  5. Among the ones not taken, pick your favorite one

Of course, when naming an app which is part of GNOME itself, the rules are a little different because these apps have completely generic names describing their function or the type content they show (e.g. Files, Image Viewer, Fonts, Music). That’s a much more rare (and usually easier) case though, so in this tutorial I’ll focus on independent third-party apps.

Let’s look at a real-world example of this process. A few months ago I was involved in renaming an internet radio app. At the time it was called Gradio, which was a bad name for many of the reasons mentioned above, and we wanted a nicer name for the new, completely rewritten version of the app.

1. Brainstorm

So, internet radio. What words immediately come to mind?

  • Radio
  • Transmission
  • Stations

These are pretty generic, so let’s branch out a bit. As with most digital technologies it’s hard to find nice metaphors, but we can make use of the analog predecessor to it (i.e. analog radio). Are there physical objects related to that which we could use?

  • Receiver
  • Headphones
  • Antenna

Maybe something related to analog radio technology?

  • Transistor
  • Frequencies

What about names of people who worked on the technology?

  • Marconi
  • Hertz

2. Thesaurus

Now that we have a few words to start with, let’s plug them into a thesaurus and see if there are any good related words. This is usually pretty hit or miss, as most related words you’ll find will not be relevant to the domain or make sense as names. However, after a few searches I always find a few good options that I didn’t think of before.

Update: I recently found another good website to find related words, appropriately named relatedwords.org.

Here are a few additional words from thesaurus searches:

  • Transmission
  • Shortwave
  • Wireless
  • Decibel

In this particular case we also had a brainstorming session on Matrix with a group of people from the community, which produced a few more options:

  • Longwave
  • Shortrange
  • Hzzzzz
  • Spectrum
  • Waves

3. Pick the best ones

Now we have about 20 words, which is a good place to stop brainstorming and start looking at which ones would make good names.

This process is not very scientific, just look at each word and imagine it as the name of the app. In particular, pay attention to the length of the name, ease of pronunciation, and whether it sounds nice.

In this case, some of my favorites are:

  • Transistor
  • Hertz
  • Spectrum
  • Shortwave

They’re all relatively short, easy to pronounce, and sound good as app names. The main question at this point is whether we can use them or if they’re already taken.

4. Check if they’re taken

I usually start off by searching directly on Github, to see if there are other FOSS projects already using the name. If I don’t find anything there, I search for the name on on Duckduckgo, adding “app” or “open source”.

In many cases you’ll find something somewhere using the name already. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem if it’s an app/project/company in a different domain, but it’s good to avoid large projects and companies.

In this case, it turns out “Transistor” is already a radio app for Android. Since it’s an app doing something very similar, people might think our radio app is affiliated with this project, which we want to avoid.

“Hertz” is the name of a car rental service. It’s a pretty big company, so best to stay away from that as well.

“Spectrum” is already the name of a forum software (which looks really cool btw). The potential for confusion is low, but the project looks well-established with 6000+ stars on Github, so not a great option.

“Shortwave” is used by a bookmarking app, and there are some search results related to actual analog radio software, but nothing that looks big or problematic. This seems like a viable option.

5. Pick a winner

At this point you probably already know which of the viable options you like best, so just go ahead and make it official. In our example,”Shortwave” won because it was short but distinct-sounding, related to the domain, a pronounceable English word, and not taken by any major projects or companies.

The Shortwave Gitlab repo with the new name

If you find that all your favorites are taken, go back to the first steps and do some more brainstorming. The perfect name for your app is out there, and you’ll find it!

Bonus: Good Examples

For inspiration, here are some examples of well-named third party apps in the GNOME ecosystem, and what makes their names great:

Fragments — A torrent app. The name is great because it’s unique among torrent app names (which usually reference water, e.g. Deluge), yet still clearly connected to the domain (BitTorrent splits up files into lots of tiny parts and sends them in random order).

Peek — A GIF screen recorder. The name is very appropriate since the app is for making short recordings of small parts of the screen. The app feels small, quick, and frictionless, which the name perfectly encapsulates.

Teleport — Sends files across the local network.  The idea behind Teleport is to make sending a file across the local network effortless compared to other methods, such as using web services or USB drives. Using a sci-fi metaphor in the name lends itself well to that.

Designing for the Librem 5

So you’re excited about the Librem 5 and GNOME going mobile, and want to start building an app for it. Of course, the first step is to design your app. This can seem quite challenging if you’re just starting out with a new platform, but fear not! In this blog post I’ll walk you through some of the most important UI patterns, and the process of going from idea to mockups step by step. Throughout this I’ll be using a read-it-later app as an example.

The GNOME design philosophy

Before starting to design for a platform, it’s good to familiarize yourself with the design philosophy of the platform. The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines have a “design principles” page which I encourage you to read in its entirety, but will paraphrase a few highlights from here:

Simplicity and Focus — Make sure you have clear goals for your app from the outset, and focus on those. Often it’s better to make a separate application to cover an additional use case rather than cramming too many things into one app (e.g. video podcasts are different enough from audio podcasts to be better off as their own app).

Search and Undo — If there are large amounts of content in your app, provide full-text search to make it easy to find things. Be forgiving about people making mistakes by making it hard to lose data, and never use a warning when you mean undo.

Avoid Preferences — “Just adding an option” often seems like a quick fix, but in most cases you’re just treating symptoms rather than the root cause. It’s better to figure out what that root cause is and fix the problem for everyone, rather than papering over the cracks with a preference. I highly recommend this article by Havoc Pennington on the topic.

Design Process

Now that we’re full of high-minded ideals, let’s jump into the actual design process. Let’s design a great read-it-later app.

We will follow the GNOME design process, which primarily consists of three steps (plus iterations):

  1. Define goals and non-goals for your app
  2. Collect relevant art, i.e. examples of similar apps to borrow ideas from
  3. Make sketches/mockups of the main views and user flows

1. Define Goals

The app we’re designing is going to be a native client for read-it-later web services (such as Pocket). These services allow you to store articles and other web pages that you are interested in, but don’t have time to read right now. That way you can catch up on all the stuff you saved later on, when you have more time. As such, our primary goals are:

  • Listing your saved articles
  • Providing a great, focused experience for reading articles in the app
  • Helping you actually catch up with your reading list
  • Storing articles offline, so they can be read without a network connection

Some non-goals, i.e. things that are out of scope for this application:

  • Social features
  • Content discovery

2. Relevant Art

The next step is to find some examples of existing apps that do similar things. It’s good to look at how other people have solved the same problems, what they do well, and what could be improved before jumping into designing a new app.

So let’s check out the competition:

Pocket on Android (screenshots by me)

Pocket on Android has a lot of features, and a pretty complicated interface. It has lots of categories, social features, a discover section, text-to-speech, and much more. I’ve personally never used most of these features, and they make the app feel quite cluttered. In my experience Pocket is also not very good at helping me get through the list of things I’ve already saved. It feels like it mostly wants me to discover new things to save (and then not read).

Clearly there are some lessons to be learned here for our app.

Instapaper on iOS (screenshots from App Store listing)

I’ve never used the app myself, but judging from screenshots, Instapaper’s UI feels a lot saner and more focused than Pocket. I also really like the rich article previews in the list view and the nice typography.

Wallabag for Android (screenshots from Google Play listing)

Wallabag is a self-hosted alternative to Pocket and Instapaper. This Android client for it (also called Wallabag) is not very sophisticated UI-wise, but it’s a good example of a very simple native client for this kind of service.

Structurally, these apps are all quite similar: a main view with a list of articles, and an article view that just displays the article in a clean, readable format.

Depending on the service, there are multiple lists for different types of articles such as Archive, Highlights, Favorites, Notes, etc. To keep things simple, and because we’re targeting Wallabag first and foremost (since it’s the only self-hosted service), we’re going with only three categories: Unread, Archive, and Favorites.

This means that our application is going to have four main screens we need to design: the three article categories mentioned above plus a reader view, which displays the article content.

3. Sketches/Mockups

Now that we have a basic idea of the structure of the app, we can finally dive into designing the UI. Personally, I like starting off with sketches on paper and then move to Inkscape for more detailed mockups, but you can use any tool you’re familiar with. You don’t need to be good at drawing or a particular application for this, just find a way to visualize your ideas which works for you :)

If you’re using Inkscape for mockups, you might want to check out the GNOME mockup template which contains some common layouts and patterns to use in your designs. If you are looking for GNOME-style symbolic icons for your mockups, you can find them here, here, and here.

When it comes to the layout of an interface, one of the first things to consider is what navigation structure makes the most sense for the type of content you have.

The most common navigation patterns in GNOME apps are the Stack, the View Switcher, and the Sidebar List.

Example of Stack navigation in GNOME Photos

The Stack pattern is when you have completely separate views with no shared UI, and a back button to go back to the overview. This is what Photos does for navigating between the stream of photos and the detailed view of an individual photo, for example. There is a bit more friction to switch between views than with other patterns, but it’s also more focused. This pattern is great for situations where you don’t switch between views a lot.

View switcher in GNOME Clocks

The View Switcher is for cases where there are a small number of views that are equally important or need to always be easily accessible. It’s used in GNOME apps such as Clocks, Music, and Software as the primary navigation. On the desktop, this switcher is always in the headerbar, but there’s work on a new adaptive version of it, which moves to the bottom of the screen for mobile. This is not quite ready yet, but will hit a version of Libhandy near you soon™.

Sidebar List in Fractal

The Sidebar List is for cases where there are a lot of views that you need to switch between often. For example, it’s used in Fractal for the room list, because it gives an overview of all rooms and allows for quick context switching. Of course, on mobile there’s not enough space for a content pane and a sidebar, so there is a Libhandy widget called Leaflet, which transforms from a Sidebar List on desktop to a Stack on mobile.

Experimental branch of GNOME Settings using HdyLeaflet to switch between Sidebar List and Stack navigation

For our read-it-later app, we need navigation to switch between the different lists (Unread, Archive, Favorites), and to switch between list and article views.

The former is a small set of views that we want to be easily accessible, so a view switcher is a good fit. Since we can’t use the shiny new adaptive view switcher widget yet, we can use a plain old view switcher in the header bar for now (though we can already design the UI with the new switcher in mind).

For the latter we could either use a stack or a sidebar list (using the Leaflet widget so it works on mobile). Since we want this app to be a focused reading experience and switching back and forth quickly between articles is not a very common use case, a Stack is probably the best solution here.

This means that our main screens will look something like this:

Quick pencil sketch of the layout for the list and article screens

Article List Screens

Now that we have a basic navigation structure we can design the individual screens in more detail. The three article list screens are basically the same lists with different content.

The main purpose of these screens is to provide a nice, legible list of the saved articles that entices people to catch up with their reading list. In order to do this we’re going with a comfortable layout including article title, preview, and some information about the article.

To help people catch up with their saved articles, we should also try to make the content as interesting as possible. A simple reverse-chronological list of saved items is quite boring, and I’ve noticed in my own use that I often scroll down the list randomly to discover older articles. A potential way to build this into the core experience would be to show the reading list in randomized order, and show the most recently saved articles at the top in a separate category. I’ve tried that in the mockups below.

Mockups of the Unread, Archive and Favorites screens (the latter two are structurally identical, though of course in the real app they’d have different content)

In terms of actions, we need to expose search and selection mode (for operations on multiple elements), as well as the application’s primary menu. The primary menu contains global app-level things such as Help, Preferences, and About.

In selection mode we need the ability to move articles to Favorites and Archive, and delete them from our reading list. Since this is not essential functionality though, we won’t be doing designs for it yet. If you want to learn more, have a look at the selection mode page in the GNOME HIG. The same goes for search (relevant HIG page).

Article Screen

The article screen’s job is pretty straightforward: provide a great reading experience for the saved articles. Since many websites kind of suck in this regard, a reader mode (like Epiphany and Firefox have) should be the default view whenever possible. However, since there’s no guarantee that a given article will be rendered perfectly, we need some way to show to the website with its native styling when necessary.

We also need a way to move an article to Favorites and Archive, delete it, and share it. The most important actions are usually exposed directly in the header bar, but for less important actions (or if there’s not enough space), we can use a secondary menu.

Mockup of the article screen

Desktop

We now know more or less what the app looks like on mobile, but what about the desktop? As with responsive web design, if you design your app for mobile first, it’s usually pretty easy to make it work well on larger screens too.

In this case, since we don’t have any sidebars or other complicated layout elements, the main change happening at larger sizes is that the content column width grows with the window, until it reaches a maximum width comfortable for reading. This can be implemented by wrapping the content area in an HdyColumn. The view switcher also moves up to the header bar, and there is a close button on the right side.

Desktop mockups of some screens

There’s more…

What we now have is the basic structure and most important screens of the application, but that’s of course far from everything. We don’t yet have designs for login and account settings, empty states, first run experience, errors, search, and a number of other things. I wanted to stick to the basics for this post, but perhaps I could expand on these things in future blog posts if there’s interest.

It’s also worth noting that mockups are never final, and interfaces almost always change during implementation, as you learn more about use cases, the underlying technology, and other constraints. Ideally you’d also do some informal user testing on real people, and get feedback on the design that way.

I hope this has been useful as an introduction to designing apps for the Librem 5 (and GNOME more generally). If you have any questions feel free to drop by on #gnome-design on IRC/Matrix or the Librem 5 apps Matrix room (#community-librem-apps:talk.puri.sm).

If you want to play with the mockups I made for this tutorial, here’s the source SVG.

Restyling apps at scale

tl;dr: If you want to change how an app looks, you need a designer in the loop.

Over the past few months we’ve had a lively debate about “theming” in GNOME, and how it affects our ecosystem. In this discussion I’ve found that there is a divide between people who design and/or develop apps, and people who don’t. I have yet to see an app developer who thinks the current approach to “theming” can work, while many people who aren’t app developers are arguing that it can.

After a few long discussions I started to realize that part of the reason why there’s so little agreement and so much drama around this issue is that we don’t agree what the problem is. Those who don’t work on apps often can’t see the issues with theming and think we want to remove things for no reason, while those who do are very frustrated that the other side doesn’t want to acknowledge how broken everything is.

The basic issue we’re arguing about is whether it’s possible to restyle applications automatically, at scale, without breaking them. In this post I’ll try to explain why I think that it isn’t possible, and why trying to do it is hurting our ecosystem.

There are no themes, just CSS

A fundamental misconception a lot of people have is that GTK 3 supports theming. This is not true, as there is no clearly defined theming API. There are CSS stylesheets, but they were only ever meant to be used by the platform and app developers. The platform stylesheet is called Adwaita (“the only one” in Sanskrit) for a reason.

However, some people (inlcluding major distributions) have been using custom stylesheets as a hacky approximation of “themes” for so long now that nobody even remembers that they are not a real theming API.

An older version of GRadio with Ubuntu’s Ambiance theme

Since CSS is a huge API surface, which is used by both app developers and “theme” developers, it’s very easy for the two to conflict. This leads to apps looking broken unless you manually do QA for every app/theme combination.

“You’re exaggerating, it’s not that bad.”

One of the most frustrating things about the current situation is that to users, it looks like it almost works. For the most part, third-party themes look and work okayish, there are just a few small bugs here and there. A button with too little contrast, an underline clashing with a border, a really large loading spinner. Not that big a deal, you’d think.

However, this view of the situation misses a few really important realities:

  1. App developers are doing a lot of bug fixing to account for “theming”, because people complain to them when their app is broken on certain distros. The current situation essentially forces developers to fix bugs for setups they never intended to support in the first place. They’re not happy about it, but they’re doing it because they don’t want their users to have broken apps.
  2. App developers are trying hard to not do anything innovative or visual in their apps, because they know it will break with other stylesheets.
  3. “Theme” developers are fixing a lot of bugs for edge cases in individual apps in their stylesheets. Of course, this is a never-ending task because as soon as a new version of an app is released, something will very likely be broken again.

All of this only kinda sorta works because we have very few apps. If we ever hope to grow our ecosystem past a few dozen apps things have to change, because maintaining a “theme” gets less sustainable with every new app.

There is also the question of what your definition of “broken” is. Some people think that things like these are acceptable:

Date picker in Calendar on Pop OS: There are double arrows left of the month and year labels.
“New Folder” dialog in Nautilus with Ambiance: There’s an invisible “Create” button in the top right.
Gedit on Pop OS: There’s a brown rectangle sticking out of the window at the top, and the widgets at the top of the sidebar look awkward and don’t make sense in this configuration.

I believe this is nowhere near ok. App developers put a lot of effort into making sure their apps look and feel right, fixing bugs, and doing QA. Having distributors change their apps (often in ways that break things) with no QA before users get to experience them is developer-hostile, and would be unacceptable in any other context.

Can you imagine Samsung restyling every third-party app on their phones, without testing them, and when Instagram complains that the text on their buttons is illegible Samsung just shrug and say “Sorry, but branding is very important to us. Why don’t you change your app?”.

“But it’s fine as long as you follow best practices!”

This is a common sentiment among some people. “If only app developers followed best practices, used CSS variables, and derived their colors from theme colors, everything would be fine”, the argument goes. While it’s true that these things are important and make apps more flexible in terms of appearance, this doesn’t come close to solving the entire problem.

If every app only used default GTK controls, in very simple layouts, with no custom widgets or in-app CSS, then best practices would perhaps be enough to prevent apps from breaking. But the reality is that a) this is not the case, and b) we really don’t want it to be the case.

Human Interface Guidelines are just that: guidelines. They have to be implemented manually, they change and evolve over time, and the best apps on any platform push their boundaries in some places and experiment with new patterns (which then sometimes make their way back into the HIG).

This kind of experimentation means that it’s impossible to “theme” apps automatically. Visual design and interaction design are very closely linked, so if you want to change the style, you need a designer to actually think about what a widget should look like.

For example: How should the Pop theme know what a “flat” variant of the new Nautilus path bar should look like? It’s impossible to do this automatically, because it’s a new pattern.

The new path bar in Nautilus
The new path bar in Nautilus with the Pop OS theme (completely broken)

This is not a rare situation, even among core GNOME apps. Many of the apps I’ve personally worked on have their own equivalent of the Nautilus path bar. And that’s the way it should be. Apps have different needs that sometimes require custom solutions, and this experimentation is good for the ecosystem. However, it also means that automatic restyling is impossible.

“But what about Adwaita Dark and High Contrast?”

The point that the dark and high contrast variants of Adwaita can be seen as GTK 3 kinda sorta supporting themes is technically accurate, but misguided. Adwaita variants may technically just be different stylesheets, but this is just an implementation detail. There are very clear differences between them and third-party “themes”.

  1. They are very very close to Adwaita code-wise, and therefore much less likely to break.
  2. There’s a finite number of them, and they are part of the platform. This makes them a tangible target for developers to test for and support, which is completely different from third-party “themes” which just apply random CSS to every app without any QA.
  3. They are part of the same design language, so they require very little extra work to adapt to from a design point of view. If you follow the best practices mentioned above, often no work at all.
GNOME Builder with Adwaita Dark

“But what about consistency? I want all my apps to look the same!”

“Consistency” is a word you hear a lot in debates about theming, but it seems to mean different things to different people.

To some, consistency effectively means “everything should use the same colors”. This is relatively easy to achieve for some apps, even across toolkits, if you simply provide a “theme” for each toolkit.
However, this “consistency” is very shallow. Just because a Qt app uses the Adwaita colors it doesn’t automatically fit in with the GNOME platform. UI patterns are much more important, and they can’t be changed with theming. There is no magic that can redesign menu bar apps with header bars.

No matter how hard you theme these, they will never look native on GNOME

Real consistency can only happen by design, and requires the app developer to build it into the app at every step. If you want all your apps to look the same, only use apps built for your platform’s HIG. “Fixing” apps after the fact with theming isn’t really making your system more consistent, but it’s hurting app developers a great deal.

Of course, even the very shallow “everything uses the same colors” consistency is impossible to enforce across all apps and toolkits. Apps like Blender, Telegram, or Steam don’t respond to system theming at all, and even Firefox and Chromium only do so in a very limited fashion.

“But users *want* themes!”

“Users” want a lot of things, but just because you want something impossible that doesn’t make it possible. In this case, it’s important to be aware of the costs of giving complete visual freedom to “themes”, both in individual app developer effort, and chilling effects on the ecosystem. If given a choice between customization and more, better apps, I’m confident the majority of people would prefer the latter.

Would it be nice if there were a way to be able to restyle every app to make them look like Material Design, or macOS, or Windows 95, and have them all look as if they were built for that style? Absolutely! I would love that! However, as I’ve tried to explain in this blog post, this is simply not realistic.

So, what can we do?

As the recent discussions have shown, talking about solutions before we agree what the problem is isn’t very productive, so for now I’m mostly interested in making sure we’re all aware of the problem and its various facets. There are several different stakeholders with different perspectives on this issue, and making progress will mean making some hard choices. At this year’s GUADEC we had a Theming & Ecosystem BoF where we talked about a number of potential directions, and I hope we can move forward on that path.

No matter what we come up with though, I think it’s crucial that we start taking the needs of app developers seriously. Developers are the lifeblood of any platform, and we’ve been treating them very poorly. If we want to grow our ecosystem and actually compete with other major platforms, we need to fix that.

Note: The examples in this post have been chosen because the themes in question ship with major distributions, so app developers tend to get complaints about them. It’s not my intention to single them out, this problem applies to all third-party themes equally.

Banquets and Barbecues

tl;dr: We’re splitting up Fractal into two separate apps: One to replace IRC, the other to replace Telegram.

This is an in-depth post on the thinking behind the split of the Fractal app, which was decided at the hackfest in Strasbourg last week. For more information about the hackfest, have a look at my other blog post.

1-1 woes

One of the biggest problems with Fractal at the moment is that 1-1 messaging is pretty terrible. Since the rooms in the sidebar are sorted by most recent activity, high-traffic public rooms (such as GNOME IRC channels) tend to drown out rooms with less traffic, such as 1-1s and small groups. This is problematic because the signal-to-noise ratio in 1-1 chats and small groups tends to be much higher than in high-traffic public rooms. This leaves the user constantly searching for the rooms they care about, while the rooms they don’t care about are always at the top.

1-1 chats are quickly drowned out by high-traffic public rooms in the sidebar

One way to solve this problem is having a favorites group for “important” rooms. This is a feature Fractal has had for a while, and it does solve some of the problems with a room list sorted purely by recent activity. However, it only works well for rooms that are important over long periods of time, and needs to be managed manually. 1-1 chats are often brief, and there can be many of them in parallel. Putting them in favorites doesn’t make sense in many cases, as it would balloon the size of the favorites group, and require lots of manual work when starting or ending a conversation.

The “obvious” solution would be doing what Riot does: Having a separate group of 1-1 rooms in the sidebar, and thereby keeping the 1-1 conversations in one consistent place. However, this creates more problems than it solves. In practice, it results in multiple groups of arbitrary length competing for real estate in the sidebar. If you have a lot of 1-1s, this means that you’ll be able to see very few rooms (even when most of the 1-1s are old and not relevant at the moment). In Riot, this group is capped at 10 visible rooms by default, but that’s still not great if you only need 2 of them at the moment. The category can be collapsed, but then you can’t see which 1-1s have new messages, and it also means lots of busywork collapsing/expanding the group. Clearly this isn’t an ideal solution, which is why we were very hesitant to go down this path.

Riot’s separate 1-1 category doesn’t really solve the problem, because old 1-1s take up a ton of vertical real estate when it’s expanded

A way out?

As we were discussing this issue over the past few months, I started looking more closely at the way people use different messaging tools. One thing I found puzzling is that despite the fact that Matrix theoretically supports the use cases covered by popular apps like Whatsapp and Telegram, few people are actually using it to replace those apps. Instead, they use it to replace IRC and Slack.

Why? My theory is that most chat rooms fall in one of three categories:
Private Chats, which include 1-1s and small groups; Team Chats, which are larger, but still private and invite-only; and Public Rooms, which are basically like IRC.

Team Chats and Public Rooms share many characteristics: Both have relatively high amounts of traffic, and there’s a lot of noise. The main difference is that Team Chats are private and the members rarely change (e.g. a company’s internal Slack), while Public Rooms can be joined by anyone at any time, and there is no expectation of privacy (e.g. #gnome-hackers on IRC).

However, Private Chats have relatively little in common with the other two categories: They are low-traffic, and have little or no noise. This may sound like a small difference, but I think it’s the reason why 1-1s suck in Fractal/Riot/IRC, and why people aren’t using Matrix to replace Telegram.

The Banquet and the Barbecue

I’ve come to the conclusion that one app can’t cover all the use cases that the Matrix protocol supports, and still provide competitive UX. If you design an app to deal with lots of high-traffic rooms (e.g. Riot as it is today), it will suck for 1-1s, so people will use something else for those. Similarly, Telegram is primarily designed for 1-1s and small groups, which is why it’s a terrible experience if you have many high-traffic groups.

If we want Matrix to succeed as more than an IRC/Slack replacement we need multiple apps, each focusing on a distinct use case. For messaging, I think the most important distinction to make is between what I call the Banquet and the Barbecue.

Slack is one of the most widely used apps covering the Banquet use case

The Banquet is a big, loud place. There are tons of people, and you don’t know many of them. Lots of things are happening all the time, and it’s hard to keep track of everything. This is what Matrix is currently mostly used for. Slack, IRC, and Discord are also all in this category.

iMessage is a good example of an app focused on the Barbecue use case

The Barbecue is at the other end of the spectrum: It’s a calm, private environment where friends, family, co-workers, and other acquaintances hang out. Conversations are mostly between 2 or 3 people, slow, and often very personal. Telegram, Whatsapp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and a myriad of other chat apps are optimized for this use case.

Fracturing Fractal

Now, what does this mean for Fractal? After a long discussion on Thursday, we decided to split up Fractal into two separate apps with different interfaces, each containing a subset of the user’s Matrix rooms.

Exactly how rooms will be split between the two apps is not 100% clear yet. 1-1s are clearly Barbecue, public rooms are clearly Banquet, but private groups could go either way. For these cases we may need a way to explicitly move rooms between apps. The distinction should probably be part of the Matrix spec, so the intent for a room to be a Barbecue or Banquet room could be set when creating a room, and persist across devices.

The two apps will share practically all the internals, and even large parts of the interface. However, the split will allow us to do some things differently in each app to optimize the interfaces for the different use cases. Some of the changes we’re considering are a bubble-style message view in the Barbecue app, and more room categories (such as low-priority) in the Banquet app’s sidebar.

For more details on the split have a look at the blog posts by Daniel, Eisha, Julian, and Adrien.

Messages and Discussions

How exactly the apps will be branded (and what will happen to the Fractal name we all love) is still being decided, but there is some consensus to move to GNOME-style generic names. The Barbecue app will almost certainly be called “Messages”. For the Banquet app there’s less agreement, but my current favorite is “Discussions”.

Early-stage mockups showing what the two different apps could look like

The Fractal brand will not go away though: We’re thinking of keeping it around as the name of the community project that develops both GNOME Matrix apps, and/or using it for the backend powering both apps.

There are lots of details to be figured out in this transition, both from a design and an implementation perspective, but I’m very excited about this new direction. If you’d like to join the effort, come talk to us on Matrix.

Note: I have no illusions that this change will magically get everyone to leave Whatsapp/Telegram/iMessage and move to Matrix. In the short term, the goal is simply to make Matrix 1-1s a good experience. That said, if we ever want Matrix to make inroads with the general public, I think a move in this direction is an important precondition.

UX Hackfest London

Last week I took part in the GNOME Shell UX Hackfest in London, along with other designers and developers from GNOME and adjacent communities such as Endless, Pop!, and elementary. We talked about big, fundamental things, like app launching and the lock/login screen, as well as some smaller items, like the first-run experience and legacy window decorations.

I won’t recap everything in detail, because Cassidy from System76 has already done a great job at that. Instead, I want to highlight some of the things I found most interesting.

Spatial model

One of my main interests for this hackfest was to push for better animations and making better use of the spatial dimension in GNOME Shell. If you’ve seen my GUADEC Talk, you know about my grand plan to introduce semantic animations across all of GNOME, and the Shell is obviously no exception. I’m happy to report that we made good progress towards a clear, unified spatial model for GNOME Shell last week.

Everything we came up with are very early stage concepts at this point, but I’m especially excited about the possibility of having the login/unlock screen be part of the same space as the rest of the system, and making the transition between these fluid and semantic.

Tiling

Another utopian dream of mine is a tiling-first desktop. I’ve long felt that overlapping windows are not the best way to do multitasking on screens, and tiling is something I’m very interested in exploring as an alternative. Tiling window managers have long done this, but their UX is usually subpar. However, some text editors like Atom have pretty nice graphical implementations of tiling window managers nowadays, and I feel like this approach might be scalable enough to cover most OS-level use cases as well (perhaps with something like a picture-in-picture mode for certain use cases).

Tiling in the Atom text editor
Tiling in the Atom text editor

We touched on this topic at various points during this hackfest, especially in relation to the resizable half-tiling introduced in 3.26, and the coming quarter-tiling. However, our current tech stack and the design of most apps are not well suited to a tiling-first approach, so this is unlikely ot happen anytime soon. That said, I want to keep exploring alternatives to free-floating, overlapping windows, and will report on my progress here.

Header bars everywhere

A topic we only briefly touched on, but which I care about a lot, was legacy window decorations (aka title bars). Even though header bars have been around for a while, there are still a lot of apps we all rely on with ugly, space-eating bars at the top (Inkscape, I’m looking at you).

Screenshot of a full-screen Blender window with a title bar
On a 1366x768px display, a 35px title bar takes up close to 5% of the entire screen.

We discussed possible solutions such as conditionally hiding title bars in certain situations, but finally decided that the best course of action is to work with apps upstream to add support for header bars. Firefox and Chromium are currently in the process of implementing this, and we want to encourage other third-party apps to do the same.

Screenshot of Firefox with client-side decorations
Firefox with client-side decorations (in development)

This will be a long and difficult process, but it will result in better apps for everyone, instead of hacky partial solutions. The work on this has just begun, and I’ll blog more about it as this initiative develops.

In summary, I think the hackfest set a clear direction for the future of GNOME Shell, and one that I’m excited to work towards. I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance, Allan and Mario for organizing the hackfest, and everyone who attended for being there, and being awesome! Until next time!

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