gnome3 – Page 6 – Form and Function

GNOME Design Update, Part Two

I left it too long to blog about what’s been happening in GNOME design, and I’ve been left with a backlog of things to tell everyone about! In my last post, I wrote about the work the GNOME designers have been doing on the core user experience, including things like the lock screen, notifications, printing and scrolling. In this one I’m going to review application design efforts, as well as work we’ve been doing around application integration.

Application development is a major focus for us in GNOME design. We recognise that GNOME needs new, updated applications, and we’ve been making good progress in that direction. GNOME already has some new applications in the shape of Web, Documents, Contacts and Boxes. Others are starting to emerge, such as Photos, Videos and Clocks. Not only are we assisting in these ongoing application development efforts, but we are also designing other new applications, and we are also working on improving the integration between applications and GNOME 3.

Here’s our recent application work.
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GNOME Design Update, Part One

As always, the GNOME design crew have been hard at work of late. We helped to drive many of the changes you can see in the last GNOME release, including a new color picker, updated application designs, new scrollbars and updated spin button widgets. We haven’t taken our foot off the gas though, and there’s plenty of work to report.

It’s an exciting time in GNOME design land right now. GNOME 3 is a big undertaking: we’re working to improve the entire experience, including everything from interface widgets and controls, through to applications and the core user experience. But we are making good progress, and more and more pieces are slotting into place. Slowly but surely, the design of the overall experience is starting to take shape.

It has been far too long since I’ve posted a GNOME design update. In fact, it’s been so long that I’m dividing this update into two. In this first part, I’m going to detail design work that is focusing on the core GNOME user experience. The second post will cover application design updates, as well as application integration. I’ll post that update in the next few days.

Excitingly, many (though not all) of these new designs are planned as features for the next GNOME release. If you want to help implement any of these designs, just get in touch.
Continue reading GNOME Design Update, Part One

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.

Looking forward to GNOME 3.4

The first beta of GNOME 3.4 came out at the tail end of last week, which means that we are roughly on track for a final release at the end of March. The beta also marks the beginning of the UI freeze for this cycle, so now seems like a good time to check out the cool stuff that’s coming in 3.4.

The following are just the changes that I know about; I’m sure that there are plenty of others. There’s no shortage of things to talk about though: the amount of improvement in recent GNOME releases has been really impressive, and this release looks like it will be no exception.

Updated Applications

Applications are where many of the big changes can be found for this release. Documents and Contacts had their first releases in 3.2. Now they’re back, and they’re joined by Boxes too. All three of these new GNOME applications feature updated user interfaces, which is the outcome of the ongoing application design work that I discussed in my last blog post. We think they’re better than what we had before; we hope you do too.

GNOME Documents Screenshot — Improved GNOME Documents (click to enlarge)

A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we’ve done it in the past.

Design is always an iterative process, and the new GNOME application design approach has been steadily evolving for some time. There have been lots of design ideas and mockups, and there has been plenty of testing of prototypes and of proper implementations. This process has resulted in some design patterns being consigned to the scrapheap while others have come to have an increasingly important place in our hearts. Slowly but surely, things are starting to fall into place.

As the new GNOME 3 application design approach has stabilised, we have been able to pursue the development of more new applications. GNOME Documents and Contacts have been joined by Boxes, Web and Clocks. We also have designs in the works for many other new applications, including Mail, Videos, Chat, Photos, Calendar and more. Each of these new designs utilise the application design approach that we have been developing. We are also starting to document our new application design approach in a new version of the HIG. This will help application developers to create their own GNOME 3 apps.

In what remains of this post I’m going to try to give you a taste of the new application designs, as well as give a bit of background about why they have been designed in the way that they are.

Maximised Windows

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