[PyQt] Making application look more sexy

Filip Gruszczyński gruszczy at gmail.com
Mon Jan 5 18:54:00 GMT 2009


Here is how PC Gen (open source) looks like:

http://www.nuketown.com/images/photos/features/macrpg/pcgen.jpg

and here is how D&D (hasbro) Insider:

http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2008/02/dandd.jpg

Both are used for D&D (and d20 system in general). You can clearly see
the difference. While guys from PC Gen might be doing great work (and
they do, since they got a few Ennie awards - that's really something
in rpg world), even they can't compete on artistic level - and it
seems they don't even try.

I don't want to violate any design guides and I would always put
usability before nice layout, but still I am - well, I am not afraid
of this word - jealous, that I can't make some themes for my app for
example (you know, some medieval theme for traditional fantasy or some
sci-fi theme, beside of course ). And I haven't seen any howto's on
achieving this kinds of effects, which would be in my opinion really
cool to have. And it wouldn't prevent anyone from choosing some
default Gnome or KDE or Windows style.

> Speaking as a user (not of RPG stuff like this but other tools) I absolutely
> HATE it when they try and make their app "stand out" by violating all of the
> design guides for $PLATFORM.
>
> Usually they make the app significantly harder to use and it doesn't really
> look any better after you've sat and used it for a week.
>
> Worse still is when they try and emulate the look of some real world
> device - "oh I am making a media player, I'll ignore the fact the PC has a
> much better display and input device and make it look like a CD player!"
>
> If you absolutely think it's going to make a difference at least have
> a "normal" skin that looks like it's supposed to ;)
>
> As you can guess this is one of my pet peeves.. :)
>
> --
> Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
> for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
> "The nice thing about standards is that there
> are so many of them to choose from."
>  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
> GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
>



-- 
Filip Gruszczyński



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