Form and Function – Page 20 – Allan Day's GNOME Blog

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.

Announcing Every Detail Matters

Today I’m announcing a new GNOME initiative called Every Detail Matters, the aim of which is to take care of all the little details and make sure that every part of GNOME 3 really shines. It will also provide great opportunities for those wanting to contribute to GNOME.

Minor visual and operational details make a huge difference to the user experiences that we provide. Small bugs can seriously undermine the overall experience. At the same time, little details can make the difference between being good and being amazing. The aim of Every Detail Matters is to focus in on these small details and make sure that we get them right. Continue reading Announcing Every Detail Matters

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