Talk:Designs/Toolbars

Importance of a "Common" interface

I believe a lot of the success of the Apple personal computer came from the fact that Apple imposed a *single* interface that all applications had to adhere to. Once an user learned how to interact with one application, that knowlege could be applied towards interacting with the next application.

A number of the OLPC Activities have been "ported" from other platforms, and have brought their own (_not_ OLPC) toolbars with them. I realize that OLPC is very short of development resources. Nevertheless, I feel that OLPC should establish a "sugarization" group of developers, whose task it would be to "rework" those Activities which have their own toolbars - to use instead a "common" OLPC toolbar interface (and appearance).

By the way, I'm someone who is "scared off" by the multitudes of toolbar icons that some desktop drawing programs (and word-processing programs) provide. In my opinion, OLPC Activities ought to strive to simplify how many toolbar icons they show by default.