every detail matters – Form and Function

Give a detail this Christmas

When I last posted about Every Detail Matters, 27 detail bugs had been fixed by 9 contributors. About two and a half months later, 43 bugs have been fixed by a total of 12 contributors. We’ve made impressive progress, and the results are already making themselves felt. Testing the latest and greatest GNOME Shell, things definitely feel more polished and better executed.

This Christmas, Every Detail Matters brings you…

Crisp menu separators. The old ones were fuzzy; now you have a clear line.

Corner synergy. The rounded corners of popup bubbles and scrollbars have been aligned.

bubble-corners-cropped

Login process indication. This has been the subject of a few different fixes. We now have proper insensitive states in the login screen, and a spinner is displayed if login is taking a while.

A “No messages” label when the tray is empty.

no-messages

A hover effect for window thumbnails. A border is displayed around window thumbnails when you hover over them; it’s a small thing, but it’s really satisfying.

A transparent top bar in the lock screen. I featured this in my last Every Detail Matters blog post; it has now properly landed, and has had some nice polish work done on it.

transparent-top-bar-scaled

An icon to remind you when you have headphones plugged in. This bug wasn’t actually part of Every Detail Matters, it goes to show that there is plenty more happening in GNOME to get the details right.

We hope you like what we’ve been working on. If you’re looking for a hacking project for the holiday, check out the Every Detail Matters wiki page. GNOME Shell is a lot of fun to work on, and we’ve got some nice bugs just waiting for someone to fix them.

Fantastic Progress in Every Detail Matters

Every Detail Matters is back for a second round, and let me tell you: it is bigger and better than ever. I have been totally blown away by the response we’ve received.

We managed to fix 20 Every Detail Matters bugs for GNOME 3.4. That target has already been blown out of the water for the 3.8 cycle. At the time of writing, I count 27 bugs fixed by 9 different contributors. We’ve got some really great fixes in there, like improving animations in the lock screen and making the login experience smoother. There’s also been some nice usability enhancements to the Message Tray and Activities Overview.

We’re not done yet though: there are 14 bugs that are currently being worked on, and many more that we want to tackle. I’m adding items to the list all the time, including new features as well as smaller tasks for newcomers. If you want to help make GNOME 3.8 awesome, check out the Every Detail Matters wiki page. If there isn’t something that appeals straight away, come back and check again: we’re updating the page all the time. There’s plenty of time to get involved.

Everyone who has contributed to Every Detail Matters has done a fantastic job so far. A special mention has to go out to Stéphane Démurget, who only recently started contributing, but who has been doing a brilliant job. Stéphane hasn’t just been fixing lots of bugs, but he has been fixing them with style, and has been a real pleasure to work with.

I’d also like to give big thanks to Giovanni Campanga, Florian Muellner and Jasper St. Pierre, who are regular contributors who have been busy fixing bugs and reviewing patches. And now for some screenshots of the work done so far. :)

Yes, it’s a detail. But then, details matter: we have a nicer looking run dialog now. The most important feature of this is that it now has a close button, which means that people have an escape route if they accidentally open it. Another thing that this screenshot shows is our new background shade, which is used for modal dialogs and the overview. It used to be a flat transparency, but it has now been updated to use a radial gradient. This gives added depth and atmosphere.

I’m cheating with this one, because it hasn’t actually landed yet. It is cool though: Florian has updated the lock screen to use a translucent top bar, which fits better with the overlaid screen shield metaphor that we’re using here. It also looks awesome. :)

Finally, another detail (which, like all details, matters): the login screen now has properly styled insensitive buttons, and we make sure that the Unlock button is insensitive until the password entry field contains some text.

Expect more updates in the future.

Announcing Every Detail Matters, Round 2

Details matter. Small aspects of a user interface make a huge difference. Get them right, and the experience becomes beautiful, satisfying and easy. Get them wrong, and it can be clunky, awkward and ugly. It’s only by paying attention to the details that we can raise the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience and make it fantastic.

Every Detail Matters was first run in the GNOME 3.4 development cycle, with the aim of getting the details right. We assembled an awesome crew of contributors who fixed, polished and enhanced the GNOME 3 experience, and who made a big difference to the quality of the 3.4 release.

Now Every Detail Matters is back. We’re going to be working hard through the 3.8 cycle to improve as many details as possible. Together, we’re aiming to make GNOME 3.8 the most polished version yet.

Every Detail Matters is a really good opportunity to make a contribution to GNOME. For the 3.8 cycle, we are targeting a whole range of bugs. Some are easy and good for beginners, and some are a bit trickier and will need a more experienced hand to fix. There’s something in there for everyone. If you fix just one bug, you can make a real difference to GNOME 3.

There’s a list of bugs that we are targetting on the Every Detail Matters wiki page. Thanks to the efforts of our developers, a bunch of them have already been fixed while I have been putting the list together. But we want to fix more of them. Like last time, we are aiming to resolve 20 of these issues before the end of the cycle.

We’re monitoring the Every Detail Matters bugs, and we’ll make sure that you get feedback and code review as fast as possible. So, pick a bug, and get hacking!

GNOME.Asia 2012

This year’s GNOME.Asia conference wrapped up a couple of days ago, and it was a pleasure to participate for in the event for the second year running. The conference was been a fantastic opportunity to meet GNOME enthusiasts as well as see some existing contributors face-to-face for the first time.

It was a busy conference for me, as I was involved in three separate sessions. The first was a design workshop that me, Jon and Jimmac ran prior to the conference. This was a well attended event that ran for a whole afternoon. We began with a discussion of design process, and gave an overview the various stages we go through as a part of design initiatives in GNOME. After that, we demonstrated some of the tools that we use in GNOME design, with Jimmac showing off some Inkscape tips and tricks.

Myself, Jon and Jimmac gave the keynote on the Saturday morning. Titled ‘Beyond Dead Reckoning’, the presentation talked about the history behind GNOME 3, as well as discussing where GNOME is today and where it is going. In the final part of the talk, we presented our recent design work and our efforts to define a new pattern language for GNOME application design. We’ll be giving a talk on the same theme at GUADEC next month.

I also gave the keynote on the Sunday morning. This was an updated version of the presentation I gave in FOSDEM earlier in the year, which centred on the Every Detail Matters initiative. I think that effort contains some important lessons for how we organise our development efforts in GNOME, as well as how we can improve other outreach initiatives.

As ever, the highlight of the conference was the people. It’s always fantastic to meet enthusiasts and contributors, as well as to speak to people who might want to participate in GNOME in the future. GNOME.Asia does a fantastic job of bringing new people into the community, and deserves all our support for that reason alone.

Big thanks to the GNOME.Asia organisers – Max, Haggen and Sammy especially – as well as the volunteers who helped out on the day. They worked extremely hard to make the conference run smoothly, and did a great job taking care of those of us who flew in to give talks.

I’d also like to thank the GNOME Foundation for assisting with the organisation of the conference, as well as enabling me to attend.

Every Detail Matters: Objective Achieved!

We set an ambitious goal for the first round of Every Detail Matters: we said that we would aim to fix 20 UX bugs by the end of the current release cycle. That’s not an easy thing to do: seemingly trivial bugs can turn out to be tricky little blighters, and 20 bugs is a lot of fixes to develop, review and land.

For much of this cycle, I wasn’t sure whether we would reach our goal. We did some great work, but the big 20 target often seemed a long way off. But, thanks to a last-ditch push by the GNOME Shell crew, we managed to hit that 20 bug total. Florian Müllner, who has been fantastic throughout EDM, closed the last bug right on the whistle, just before we hit the code freeze.

This is a really fantastic achievement, and I’m really impressed with everyone’s determination to make Every Detail Matters a success. I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed patches and helped to get them reviewed and landed.

I’m currently testing the upcoming GNOME 3.4 release, and I can definitely say that it is much improved thanks to everyone who has been working on EDM. There are some nice visual improvements that should be noticeable but, just as important, there are also many invisible fixes that will prevent frustration or annoyance.

So, without further ado, here are the champions who contributed patches and made it happen:

Stefano Facchini
Zan Dobersek
Joost Verdoorn
Florian Müllner
Seif Lotfy
Jean-Philippe Braun
Stefano Candori
Vít Stanislav
Marc Plano-Lesay
Alex Hultman

What’s really nice is that most of the people in this list fixed more than one bug each, and quite a few were collaborative efforts. (You can see the full list of fixed (and unfixed) bugs on the Every Detail Matters wiki page.)

All of the Every Detail Matters work will be included in the upcoming GNOME release (version 3.4), which will be out next week. Every Detail Matters will hopefully return for another round early next development cycle.