A Much Belated Boston Summit Blog Post

Last week I returned from a great trip to Boston, which included my first experience of GNOME Boston Summit – a three-day event that was held at MIT over the Columbus Day weekend.

Boston Summit comes at the beginning of a release cycle, which makes it a good opportunity to plan ahead and think about priorities for the next release. It was for this reason that I really wanted to be at the event this year. It gave me a chance to talk to people, find out what they are interested in working on, and figure out what I should be focusing on for the next six months.

True to its billing, GNOME Summit was an unconference: we started with a blank schedule, listed what we wanted to cover, and worked from there. I enjoyed the flexible nature of the format. Having the opportunity to shuffle sessions around on each day meant that we could adjust our focus as the event progressed.
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Taking GNOME 3 to the next level

It’s time to talk about GNOME 3.6.

I’m more excited about this release than any since 3.0. The list of major updates is impressive: new message tray, updated Activities Overview, lock screen, integrated input sources, accessibility on by default, new Nautilus. Then there are all the small changes: new style modal dialogs, bags of improvements to System Settings, a new Empathy buddy list, SkyDrive support, natural scrolling, new backgrounds, an overhauled Baobab… the list goes on and on.

Make no mistake: 3.6 is a major upgrade to GNOME 3. I’ve been testing it for a while now, and switching away from my development environment feels like a big step down. A huge amount of work has gone into this release, and it has been targeted at key aspects of the GNOME 3 user experience. We’ve done a lot, and we’ve made our work count.

So, without any further ado, let’s look at a few of the bigger features in detail…
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GNOME OS

In my last post I described how, during this year’s GUADEC, members of the GNOME community came together to plan where the project could go in the next 18 months or so. The slides from Xan and Juanjo’s talk give some of the background to those discussions. We took copious notes during the planning sessions that were held; these will all be available online soon, so you can get a more detailed picture if you want one. In what follows I’ll try to give a bit an overview.

But first, a clarification. The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years, and there has been a fair amount of confusion about what it means. Some people seem to have assumed that GNOME OS is an effort to replace distributions, so let me be clear: that is not the case. While the creation of a standalone GNOME OS install does feature as a part of our plans, this is primarily intended as a platform for testing and development. In actual fact, all of the improvements that we hope to make through the GNOME OS initiative will directly improve what the GNOME project is able to offer distributions.

Many of the things that we want to do as a part of GNOME OS are old ideas that have been around in the GNOME project for a really long time. The aspirations that are driving this process include things like providing a better experience for application developers, automated testing, sandboxed applications and broad hardware compatibility. While each of these goals could be pursued independently, there are enough interconnections between them to make a holistic plan worthwhile. Yes we could call the initiative something else, but GNOME OS has stuck, and it kinda fits (as I hope to explain a bit better below).

We’re setting out to drain swamps, fix the most glaring issues in our ecosystem, and establish a new model for the future. We don’t know whether we’ll succeed, but there are enough people in our community who care about these issues that we just might be able to do it. The best part is: you can help.
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An Awesome GUADEC and a Bright Future

GUADEC Group Picture by Ana Rey

This year’s GUADEC was one of the best that I have ever attended. I have never seen the GNOME community so energised. New contributors were more visible than ever before, and all of them were fantastically enthusiastic and motivated. It is always a wonderful experience to see newcomers be inspired by our community. Our outreach efforts are more successful than ever.

One of the things that has made this year’s GUADEC stand out is the big strides we have made to set goals for the medium and long-term. There is no denying that our project faces challenges; I think this is true for many actors in what we call the desktop space. What is exciting is that the GNOME community is coming together to face those challenges. More details will emerge in the coming weeks, but we have started initiatives here that address a number of significant issues, such as making it easy to develop applications for GNOME, doing more to test the core UX and ensure quality, and we have discussed how fill in the missing pieces in our plans for the GNOME 3 user experience.
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Report: A Coruña UX Hackfest

We had a fantastic UX hackfest earlier this week. A group of 14 contributors spent two days in the Igalia office here in A Coruña. The brought together designers and developers, and gave us an opportunity to work through some high-priority design issues.

Here’s a brief report on what we got up to.

Day One

The first day was all about files and file selection. We started with a session on the ongoing work to improve Files (aka Nautilus). This covered the role of previews in Files and how that can be improved. We also discussed how we can improve search results for files in the Activities Overview.

We broke into two groups in the afternoon, and this let us get some Serious Work done. One group concentrated on menus in Nautilus. First we reviewed the current menus, including context menus and the new gear menu button. After that we developed a plan for how to better organise them. We made some excellent progress here; I’ll be working to distill our work into a concrete proposal soon.

The other group concentrated on the file chooser. A key goal here was to ensure that Nautilus and the file chooser are as consistent as possible. The group developed a set of use cases, identified goals and constraints, and then produced some mockups. Some great ideas came out of this session, and should hopefully filter into ongoing development work.

Day Two

We switched gears for the second day. The morning was spent reviewing the new initial setup assistant which is being worked on for GNOME 3.6. Jasper demonstrated his work in progress; we identified UX issues with the implementation as well as aspects of the design that could be improved. You can read our notes from that session on the wiki.

The afternoon was spent examining search within applications. We looked at search implementations in a range of GNOME apps, including System Settings, Documents, Contacts, Files and DevHelp, noting the advantages and disadvantages of each implementation. This enabled us to write a set of design guidelines for how search should be designed within applications. We also agreed a number of changes to the current search implementations in Contacts and Documents.

The hackfest was a great success. Each of the topics that we covered are important, and we made excellent progress on each of them. We will be working up and publishing the results of the event in the future.

As ever, one of the best things about the hackfest was the opportunity to work alongside other contributors. We had a fantastic group in attendance, including impressive new contributors all of whom had a positive impact. The event was a great opportunity to grow the GNOME design community.

I’d like to thank the hackfest sponsors – your support has been invaluable.