With all the talk about revitalizing Tk, I started thinking about the problem from another angle - that of the Tcl community. While Tk has become very popular and widely used, maybe there hasn't been enough emphasis on how to use it well?
For instance, I don't recall reading anything about GUI design in Brent Welch's otherwise excellent book. While it's clearly out of the scope of his work, a few pointers and suggestions to go along with all of the powerful Tk tools he shows to the world would be welcome.
I think creating more "cultural awareness" of good design would be a good first step, possibly including some critiques and suggestions?
References:
* http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/index.html - GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (1.0)
Who do Gnome think they are to teach anyone how to make good GUIs? They use fonts so small that got me squinting all the time in all Gnome applications in three different distros, made me hate their whole environment practically forever and I still haven't been able to make those fonts look decently visible to the human eye. The Gnome "Control Panel" allows very little control of the fonts. I find that panel all quite pitiful, actually.
I don't find what you say to be true in my case, but the point is not whether Gnome is a good gui or not at the moment. The point is that they are attempting to be systematic in their approach to it - defining what a good gui is and giving some guidelines about how to go about making one. With that approach, they will improve. The advice on that page doesn't seem so bad to me in any case. Maybe Microsoft, Apple, KDE or someone else has something better that could be listed as well?
Incidentally, I have a lot to learn on this subject myself, and would love it if someone gave me some thoughtful input on my own GUI apps - davidw.