GNOME HIG: 130 pages of fun

The usability guys working on GNOME released human interface guidelines, version 1.0. It has been long in the making, in its various guises. Back in 1998, gnome-gui-list was the battleground of much useless fighting over something that had a name but otherwise never got far: The GNOME Style Guide. But things have progressed. Serious effort by people who know what they are doing has helped a lot here, and without having read the finished document, I believe this thing might be worth something. It's time for application developers to make their stuff comply, if possible, with the contents of that document — usability, accessibility and consistency are all good things, and should be easier to achieve with the help of the HIG.

And I guess the group "application developers" includes me.

Nekkid

Center of Helsinki. 18th of August, 2002. 04:30 in the morning, sun just starting to rise. 1500 people, both sexes, all ages, totally naked. Spencer Tunick shooting pictures of you, for his Nude Adrift series. First picture of people standing up, second lying on the ground in the street, third sitting around the Havis Amanda fountain, fourth of just the men standing in the park in front of a statue. I was there.

It was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. It's not that nakedness itself is weird — most Finns are quite used to it, thanks to sauna — but the sheer mass of people, in a place where you are definitely not used to seeing people without clothes. You totally blend in the nude mass. It was fun.

[UPDATE]

So 1500 was the estimate Tunick gave when addressing us before we stripped. The reporters have been talking about 1900.