Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist

# 1 Introduction to the Common Desktop Environment

Contents of Chapter:

Advantages of a Common User Interface

Relationship to X/Open Motif Style Guide

The Common Desktop Environment is a graphical user interface for UNIX in its various flavors (AIX , Digital UNIX , HP/UX , Solaris , UnixWare , etc.). UNIX is a powerful and portable operating system. The desktop now brings unparalleled ease of use to UNIX.

The desktop has been jointly developed by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems. It is being adopted as a standard operating environment by these companies and many others in the UNIX workstation market.

## Advantages of a Common User Interface

The desktop interface brings greater ease-of-use and a consistent interface to UNIX. This provides many advantages to both end users and application developers. Among these advantages are:

- An easier to use interface enables users to learn the system quickly and use it efficiently.

- Consistency between UNIX platforms enables users to move from one computer to another with minimal difficulty. It also enables programmers to write a single application that can be compiled for each platform, significantly reducing development effort.

- The desktop provides as much consistency as possible with the Microsoft WindowsTM and IBM OS/2TM environments. This enables users to easily move between these environments and the desktop.

- Unlike many competing operating systems, several built-in productivity applications enable the desktop user to be productive before buying application software.

- The desktop specifications have been submitted to the X/Open standards organization, ensuring that desktop is "open" and will not tie the user to proprietary solutions.

## Relationship to X/Open Motif Style Guide

The desktop user interface follows the X/Open Motif guidelines. Motif, however, does not define a desktop, only the basic behaviors for applications and widgets. The Style Guide and Certification Checklist defines the guidelines that allow an application to integrate well with the desktop. Thus, to write a desktop-conforming application, you should follow both the OSF/Motif Style Guide, Revision 1.2 and the Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist .

Compliance with the desktop interface guidelines is voluntary and self-regulated. There is no formal certification process. Applications that meet all the required guidelines in this style guide and the OSF/Motif Style Guide can be considered desktop compliant.

Priorities have been assigned to each guideline: Required, recommended, and optional.

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