Allan – Page 21 – Form and Function

GNOME Design Update

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these design update posts. There’s plenty going on in GNOME design at the moment though, so I thought it would be a good idea to write about what’s being worked on. Here’s what we’ve been up to recently.

Perhaps the biggest and most exciting design venture right now is Jon and Jimmac’s ongoing application design work. We all know about Documents and Contacts, which had initial releases in 3.2. Now other new application designs are being produced, including Music, Photos, Chat, Transfers, Weather, Web, Mail, Calendar, Videos, Clock, Maps and Notes. These application designs are looking pretty awesome, and we’re already had developers stepping up to work on them. You can check them out them out on the wiki.

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Power to the people

Some design tasks fall into place fairly quickly. Others seem to refuse to be resolved, despite your best efforts to wrestle them into shape. I managed to finish up one such task last week, for the power settings panel. It had been dogging me for what seemed like an age, so I’m really happy to have it more or less sorted.

The design of the configuration options was actually resolved last cycle. The status part of the design remained unfinished, however. That power status part was the tricky bit, since it had to represent power information for both the actual device which GNOME is running on and any connected devices which might have their own power status. Last week, after many iterations, I finally came up with what seems to be a nice solution. Continue reading Power to the people

GNOME 3.2: big steps forward

I was busy with other things when 3.2 was released, hence my only writing about it now. Having just started using the new release full time, I have to say that I’m really impressed with how it turned out. The rate of progress since the 3.0 has been extremely high.

3.2 was an important release, in my opinion. There’s a ton of minor fixes and incremental improvements in there, as well as some bigger changes, such as the new login dialogs. Together, these changes make 3.2 feel like a really big improvement. It’s smoother, more robust, more attractive, and better integrated. 3.2 has set a very nice pace of improvement to the GNOME 3 core user experience.

Continue reading GNOME 3.2: big steps forward

Clocking on

This blog has been quiet for a little while now. I’ve been busy doing other things, mainly finishing up my studies, which are now complete (woo hoo!) I also took a well-earned break. Now I’m back, starting today as a member of the Red Hat desktop team.

I’m hugely excited to be taking on this role. It will enable me to step up a gear in my work on GNOME, and I’m also looking forward to working for one of the biggest supporters of upstream FOSS. So, watch this space!