Do you agree that Lazarus needs modern graphics?

[Martin_fr]

I spent lot of energy and time on making Lazarus/FreePascal better, my friend.

And there are hundreds of volunteers like you, who help, and who deserve thanks.

The link I posted has the core developers.
You will also find in the Lazarus about screen (or somewhere in the install dir) a huge list of contributors. (mainly those that contributed code/ bugfixes and similar).

On top of that there are people helping others on the forum, or mail list, reporting and helping to reproduce bugs, or spreading the word.

All very important things. None of them is ignored.

I was thinking that Lazarus was a Open project.

It seems that with the time, it becomes a project very "bourgeois" who can not  " se remettre en question ".
I let you use your hated Google Translator to translate it.

"ability to question itself / reflect on itself"

Believe me we do.

But there are points when a decision must be made. Sometimes ideas/requests will lead to something, sometime the will not.

[Fred vS]

Sometimes ideas/requests will lead to something, sometime the will not.

Every time NO ideas/requests will lead to nothing.

[jwdietrich]

It seems that with the time, it becomes a project very "bourgeois" who can not  " se remettre en question ".
I let you use your hated Google Translator to translate it.

Merci, vous êtes bien aimable.

[Fred vS]

Here is my last proposition. After that, i gonna fix some Lazarus bugs. 

Because this huge passion for the splash screen, i propose to change the splash screen for each new version of Lazarus.

It could be a kind of poll / voting for the new splash screen...

The advantage is, when loading Lazarus, you can directly recognize what version is loaded.

Bye, i have to code now because I have lost a lot of time with that topic. 

EDIT : Of course the actual splash-screen gonna be in the poll.
 

[typo]

Juha, all of us want to leave our "mark" in this world., this is not exactly a problem.

Making open source software is a good way of doing that.

[JJVillamor]

And next to the persons on the developers list we are all a bit decision maker. The developers do listen to what users want or need. And although Juha may have used an unfortunate choice of words I fully agree with him and say: "Can we now please spend all our energy and time on making Lazarus/FreePascal better and stop wasting time a something as unimportant as style?"
I know lots of products that look 100 times as good as Lazarus but don't perform as expected, so I settle for a less stylish product that lives up to the users expectations as far as programming possiblities and ease of use are concerned.
Like Martin already said I haven't seen any Lazarus users expressing the need for a new style, so let us please move on.
 

The current splash screen is much better than every draft that was suggested in this thread. I would therefore plead to keep the current version as it is (at least for the present).

Apart from that there are more than 2000 unresolved bugs at http://bugs.freepascal.org, many of them are more important than a splash screen.

The splash screen and other cosmetic changes is indeed of lesser importance and takes a backseat to main programming features. However, it's modification  should not be totally wiped under the rug. Why not create another thread for its discussion and maybe those who are interested and have the graphic skills can come up with something worth considering? An option would be some minor recoding so that the splash screen can be easily user-customized.

[JuhaManninen]

Juha, all of us want to leave our "mark" in this world., this is not exactly a problem.
Making open source software is a good way of doing that.

Indeed, but there are 2 kinds of marks you can leave.
One kind is obtained by working hard for many years to create true substance.
Another kind comes by spraying your "marks" around.

I put it another way: Changing the project's splash screen and the outside image is a privilege of the people who have created substance for the project. It is not a "normal" contribution.
The more a person has created substance the more voting power he has for such things.

Succesful open source projects are not democratic. Lazarus surely is not democratic.
Because there is confusion of such a fundamental fact, I recommend a book written by a developer of Subversion project:
  http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.pdf
"Chapter 1. Introduction" starts with: Most free software projects fail.
... and so it is.

Now if just anybody here could vote for important decisions of the project, developers would lose interest very quickly and the project would die.
Still, people who have contributed very little, or nothing, feel they are qualified to change the whole outside image of the project!

Another analogy: somebody has built a house and a yard. It is his territory. You don't go and spray your "marks" there because you respect the territory of others. Lazarus project is a territory of people who made it. Why don't you respect it?

Then, how to get the voting power? It is easy to answer:
You must create or improve a substantial feature in Lazarus and maintain it for many years. You will fix hundreds of bugs while doing it. You must make small decisions all the time for code's structure and feature requests coming from others.
You notice how your other duties suffer because you used so much time for this development. You question your sanity every day for doing it for free.

Once you have done that for some years then you are qualified to spray your "marks". Until then, please go spray them somewhere else.

[taazz]

I disagree in every single point that has been made.
From personal experience I can sat that a good program is not a good graphics designer and most good graphics designers are not programmers at all.
This kind of mentality especially for trivial matters like the splash screen is a stop gap for the community building process. Instead you should consider it as an excuse to raise community interest. A simple contest which you will call people to design their own splash screens and invite users to vote on what they think would be a more positive way to handle this situation.

No one said that the programmers should waist their time in splash screens about boxes or anything else they see as a waist. a community needs all those things though including trendy design and eye candy to attract more people especially younger people.

[JuhaManninen]

From personal experience I can sat that a good program is not a good graphics designer and most good graphics designers are not programmers at all.

True, that is a good point.
However this "competition" for creating a new splash screen is out of proportions with anything else now.
It is a psychological thing. The splash screen shows first when you open Lazarus. It is like the small jaguar statue in front of Jaguar cars or the star in Mercedes. It is like a trophy. Every newbie gets a primitive reaction: "Hey, I want my picture there".
In reality the splash screen is not important for people who actually use Lazarus. It may be open the whole day but you see a splash screen only for 2 secs.

I personally like the current pic and I don't want a new one. It should be made configurable. Martin suggested to have only a cmd line switch, but IMO it could be stored in local config, too.
People will make so many pics that they all cannot be included in Lazarus distribution. They must be downloaded from net. It is all doable, just somebody provide a patch and I will look at it.

To get perspective, please remember where this discussion started. I wanted to have a new web main page made as a community project. I thought I was doing a good thing.
Then "a moped escaped" from the new page author's hands and he wanted to throw away everything that was created during 12 years of development. It was not really part of the deal.
The developers who spent thousands and thousands of hours making Lazarus tick, were suddenly evil people who wanted to prevent progress.
Much of the criticism came from people who have not made a single contribution themselves.

This proves how difficult open source development is when the project grows. I should have organized things much better.
I think I should have sticked to the original plan with a FreeBSD VM.
A clear contract should have been made with the author. What is desired, what is not desired, and so on.
One more lesson learned.

[Graeme]

New splash for Lazarus: http://imagebin.org/253742

With a spelling mistake...    "Free Pascal" is two words - a common error on the internet.

[typo]

A simple contest which you will call people to design their own splash screens and invite users to vote on what they think would be a more positive way to handle this situation.

I agree.

Anyway, the "clinging" about the splash screen was a surprise for me. But conservatism about the project is good.

[taazz]

You are absolutely right that the current conversation is out of scope for the task at hand and I appreciate all the effort put in to it. I am not bushing the splash screen or anything like that don't get me wrong that was an example only. I simply expressed my ideas for a more community driven approach on trivial matters that will minimize the time spend from the coordinators of the project raising cooperation spirit in the community at the same time, that contradicts your final statement of "find an author and be done with it".

In any way nsunny has done a good job, although a bit to rich on colors for my liking is very well balanced.

[hrayon]

I recommend the brand management. I think it involves standardized colors, logos, slogans, polls, what each symbol means, what message you want to convey to users, etc, in a documented file. So when someone try change something about this, first, he (she) will read "the" standard documented file about this, and try to maintain consistency.
Perhaps this document already exists.
I think the beginning of the post was about it, right?
Need change? My opinion is yes.
But wait, it's just an opinion. No offense or "pee" here or there.
For me, still the BigChimp post is valuable:
"In the absence of professional designers, we have to make do with what we have, I think."
I'm not a professional designer. Only an user, or consumer.
And when BigChimp said "we", I don't feel in. I'm new here.
I don't feel a so good programmer to correct errors in Lazarus yet (well i bought the Lazarus book).
You can certainly ignore the ideas. These are only ideas. Enjoy it deems useful. It's a way to help them. The forum is for this too, isn't?

[Dick, from the internet]

I have seen the splash screen at least a thousand times, but have never really looked at it until now.  After reading some of the comments on this page, I went back and opened it up again to try to get an understanding of all the dissent here.  Maybe I am reading more into it than there is - its' hard to tell with the written word.

Anyway, after staring at it a few moments, I think that maybe it does need a renovation.  I really feel the cheetah should be facing to the right (and moved to the left of the panel) - as looking forward to the future (in my left-to-right world); or towards the dawning of a new day for such an outstanding project.  Otherwise, leave it be.

My two cents...

  regards,
      geno

[irfanbagus]

actions speak louder than words. if you think lazarus need new 'modern' splash screen, then start make new one. but make it the good one, better than the old one. if your new splash screen better than the old one i think no reason to not make it official splash screen.