<chapter id="ui-guide-about">

    <title>About this book</title>

    <para>
      This book contains the user interface guidelines that developers
      should follow when writing applications for the GNU Network
      Object Model Environment (GNOME).
    </para>

    <para>
      One of the main goals of the GNOME project is to provide a
      consistent graphical user interface for applications.  Users can
      benefit greatly from a uniform and consistent look-and-feel
      among applications.  When a group of programs share the same
      philosophy about the user interface, users can just learn the
      interface to one of those programs and apply their knowledge on
      the rest of them, without having to re-learn different user
      interface conventions for each program.
    </para>

    <para>
      This document describes the philosophy of the GNOME user
      interface and contains ways in which developers may access the
      standard user interface elements of GNOME.  Wherever possible,
      it contains source code examples that can be used to implement
      this functionality.  It also provides examples of how not to
      design user interfaces for GNOME applications; these appear with
      an explanation regarding why these examples are "bad design" and
      how to correct them.
    </para>
  </chapter>

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