Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

I started writing this as a comment on Andy’s post, but it ended up quite long so I decided to blog it instead

From a user’s perspective, I’m inclined to agree—to put it bluntly, I can’t really recall the last major innovation I saw on my GNOME desktop. After all these years, we’re still mostly working on things that Windows and, more recently, OS X, can do for us already if we’re prepared to pay Apple or Microsoft for the privilege.

Clutter is one such example—it’s a promising technology for developers, and maybe it will turn out to be a “way out” of the “decadence” Andy describes. But if we just use it to write clones of Front Row or CoverFlow or any of Apple’s other CoreAnimation-based apps, then Apple will have moved on again by the time we’re finished and we’ll just be playing catch-up again.

In any case, Clutter is just a toolkit, and toolkits don’t help us with the vague lack of coherence and integration on some parts of our desktop today, or the need for more clarity of purpose going forward. For that I applaud Havoc et al.’s vision of an online desktop—while it’s not one that desperately excites me personally, I don’t have anything better to propose, and having everybody focusing on something is surely better than nobody focusing on anything

As for the HIG—I really don’t believe that it stifles creativity any more than (say) Apple’s HIG stifles theirs, but it probably has been a victim of it’s own success to some extent. It was written six years ago, and as such, it describes the best practices for six-year-old GNOME apps. We do have plans to substantially revamp it, but it won’t happen overnight.

That said, the HIG shouldn’t drive major changes in GNOME’s UI, it should reflect them. But at the same time, the gtk guys (and others) need to know what changes to make for 3.0 that will support the sort of changes we might want to make going forward.

Everybody probably just needs to get talking and generate ideas to move that process along again, but I also wonder if maybe we don’t have enough rockstars in our community right at the moment—it’s much easier to reach a goal when two or three people are driving you there, than when a hundred people are all trying to make their own way.

I’ve been pretty badly neglecting my community duties recently… I have a backlog of ~2000 usability and HIG bugzilla emails to get through, and haven’t fixed any gnome-themes bugs in months. (I have at least started updating all the HIG images with the ones we got from the GHOPpers at the turn of the year, but still a good bit of work to do there, too.)

Sorry about that. I started making a bit of an effort this week to try and get through at least 10 of those bugzilla mails a day, and uploaded a few more of those HIG images last night too. I hope to continue in that vein for the next few weeks, at least…

So, I’ve just noticed that some of the Google HOPG tasks involve updating the HIG screenshots.  I don’t know if the other HIG authors were alerted to this, but I certainly wasn’t.

Apart from a degree of discourtesy to the HIG authors, this oversight is surely particularly unhelpful to the people who claimed the tasks, as the maintainers who will ultimately decide if their work is fit for inclusion have not been around to offer advice as they were going along.

Also, FWIW, the draft version of the HIG already has several updated screenshots in it, so hopefully nobody has wasted their time duplicating those.  I’ll review what I can this week, but this is my last working week this year and I have other stuff taking priority.  So maybe Bryan, Seth, Anna etc. could help out here too, if they’re reading :) 

The suggestion of designing some UI patterns for GNOME came up in tigert’s talk on Monday… I mentioned at the time that we’d already started working on this, so just for the record, here’s the list.You’ll notice we haven’t actually done any mockups yet, so feel free to start proposing some designs, or just add anything to the list that you think would be useful.