Today, after a fraction over 12 years, I bade farewell to the Solaris Desktop team to join Oracle’s Systems Experience Design team, a.k.a. sxDesign, which has a wider but still largely Solaris-focused usability remit.1
There’s been a good deal of overlap and collaboration between the two teams over the years anyway, so it’s not exactly a step into the unknown. The elders among you will remember the GNOME 1.4 usability study I presented at GUADEC in 2001, for example, which was primarily the handiwork of a previous incarnation of sxDesign… I pretty much just turned up at the end to steal the glory for the Desktop team. In your face, people I’m going to be working with now!2
While this pretty much brings an end to any ‘day job’ involvement I still had in the GNOME community (which has been basically ‘none’ for the past couple of years anyway), it certainly won’t be the end of my interest. If anything, I’ll probably be using GNOME more often again, albeit the trailing-edge enterprise-stable version we currently ship with Solaris 11. But I’ll certainly be keeping a keen eye on the GNOME 3 releases too, and continuing to call for its inclusion in Solaris as soon as is practical 🙂
1 A move I was first approached about making in about 2003, I think… who says I’m rubbish at making snap decisions?
2 I’m not really. They all left years ago.
Good luck on the new journey and let’s hope we see GNOME3 on Solaris Desktop one day.
Sounds good. I hope you have fun in the new job. 🙂
One Big Question:-
Why is Gnome Foundation so intertested in developing another web browser like “Web”.
Why don’t you help awesome Mozilla people in improving open source Firefox’s Linux support by enhancing theming and other things …. tell me why???
There is no USE-CASE for “Web” for any user of Linux. Its just wastages of resources. Why not just improve Firefox….. ????
First of all, the GNOME Foundation makes no decisions whatsoever about the content of GNOME.
Second, a lot of GNOME people do help the awesome Mozilla people. The GNOME 3 themes for Firefox and Thunderbird are maintained by GNOME folks. Heck, the previous GNOME Executive Director even went to work for Mozilla, while maintaining strong ties to the GNOME community.
You’d have to ask the guys who are working on Web what their motivation is, as I’m not one of them. But every platform out there has its own native browser, not least because it’s easier to deeply integrate with that platform’s features than any cross-platform browser will usually want to. KDE has Konqueror, Android has its Browser, OS X and iOS have Safari, Windows has IE, and GNOME has Web. I’m sure not *all* those platforms would be “wasting resources” without good reason.
Of course there are advantages to having a kick-ass cross-platform browser too, but that doesn’t make it the best solution for everyone. (Because there is *never* a “best solution for everyone”.)