gnome3 – Page 7 – Form and Function

Every Detail Matters: Half Way There!

A small Every Detail Matters update to bring sunshine and joy to your Thursday.

There have been four new bug fixes since I last gave an update, which was a little under a fortnight ago. Several of these bugs focus on visual presentation, to make sure that text is easy to read and the UI intelligible. The others address interaction gremlins, which is always important when you have a somewhat dynamic UI.

Congrats to Stefano Facchini, Vít Stanislav and Alex Hultman for getting your fixes submitted! You’re awesome, and I’m sure that the users of GNOME 3 will love your changes.

The new fixes bring us to the half way point! We set the goal of fixing 20 bugs by the end of the cycle, and we have now closed 10. So things are going well, but there is still more to do! If you fancy fixing a GNOME bug that will enhance our user experience, this is your chance to help.

I’d like to reiterate that Every Detail Matters is not just for newbies. We are also setting our sights on issues that would benefit from the attention of a more practiced hand. If you are an experienced hacker who wants to chip in but doesn’t want the hassle of figuring out what needs fixing, Every Detail Matters is definitely for you.

So:

1. Check out the wiki page

2. Pick a bug

3. Get stuck in

That is all. :)

Every Detail Matters: An Update

Last month, I announced a new initiative called Every Detail Matters. Its goal: to make GNOME 3 really awesome by ensuring that small design details are taken care of. Each round of the initiative will focus on a particular part of GNOME 3. Designers and developers will work together on refining the user experience.

For this first round of Every Detail Matters, we are focusing on the Activities Overview. We are being ambitious and are aiming to fix 20 UX bugs by the end of the release cycle.

There has already been an amazing response to Every Detail Matters. A whole crew of contributors have set to work, including some new contributors. Zan Dobersek, Seif Lotfy, Stefano Candori and Marc Plano Lesay have all successfully sumbitted patches. Vít Stanislav and Stefano Facchini are also hard at work on contributions of their own. The development version of GNOME Shell is already much nicer thanks to what they’ve been doing.

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.

Continue reading GNOME Design Update

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