Thanks to Google Streetview’s new 95% coverage of the UK, which went live yesterday, here’s a visual history of all the houses I ever lived in over there, until I moved to Ireland. Obviously I’m not telling you where they are, though 
(Although the cars have been spotted out and about in Ireland, there’s no coverage here yet…)
(Public service announcement: I’ve always hated themes and still wish they’d mostly just go away so we could all just concentrate on building and using the same sexy pixel-perfect GNOME look-and-feel. GNOME branding wins, performance wins, some people complain but don’t they always, yadda yadda. Now, with that out of the way…)
I was having a look at this OpenSolaris bug report yesterday. Basic problem: icons from the OpenSolaris Nimbus theme are showing up in some places larger than they ought to. Apparent cause is that the icon theme doesn’t provide those particular icons in a small enough size, and the larger versions aren’t being scaled down as required. The vinagre toolbar is the example given in the bug report, but I’ve seen it other places too (e.g. in the Glade toolbar editor).
Having a look at the index.theme file for Nimbus, I saw that all the icon folders were marked as “Type=Fixed”, and assumed that was the problem. However, I spent a couple of hours trying every combination of “Type=Scalable”, “Type=Threshold” and Threshold=[some-big-number]”, and “MinSize=[some-small-number]” that I could think of, and nothing changed. (I regenerated the icon cache after each change, and also tried without any icon cache at all.)
Just what should an index.theme file look like to ensure that (say) the 48×48 icons will always be scaled down to (say) 24×24 when required? Nimbus also has its own engine, could a bug there cause this problem? Or a bug in the gtk+ widgets/applications where we’re seeing the issue?
EDIT: Further to Matthias’ comment, Type=Scalable is working fine now. Not sure what I was doing wron yesterday…
Back in the Dublin office today after last week’s GNOME Usability Hackfest in London, during which I didn’t blog nearly enough.
My main goal for the week was to help figure out a plan to revise the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, which I originally helped to write almost a decade ago, but which really haven’t kept pace with the changes in either hardware or software technology over the past 5 years.
The notes from all the discussions we had aren’t all that impressive to look at, but I think the key thing is the general agreement to have less monolithic text, and switch to more of a pattern library approach. This should allow us to react much more quickly to changing trends in GNOME UI design, maintain related patterns for different types of devices such as desktop, touchscreen and stylus devices, and even allow individual distros to customize the library with their own unique, in-house patterns if they so desire. (Which hopefully won’t be too much, but it’s clear that, for example, the GNOME-based Moblin UI is a different beast from the vanilla GNOME desktop, so the Moblin team will likely want to maintain some patterns of their own.)
I’ve already started to draft up a template for what a GNOME UI pattern might look like, and hope to flesh things out a bit more over the next couple of weeks.
Of course, many other things were discussed at the hackfest as well. Nautilus and gnome-shell were hot topics, as was the old chestnut of a GNOME control centre redesign—on that front, I ended up moderating a couple of card sorting sessions during the week where we had users categorize 100 settings into groups of their choice. Charlene from Canonical presented an Empathy usability report, partly to discuss the findings, but mostly to discuss how best to present such reports to GNOME developers. And of course, Seth’s vision of a future GNOME desktop hit the headlines, making it to Ars Technica almost immediately!
On the community front, some ideas for improving the tools we use to analyse and report usability data were also discussed. And there was a strong presence from the accessibility community, to keep us all honest when coming up with anything new.
Many thanks, of course, to Google and Canonical for sponsoring the event, and particularly to the latter for hosting us in a 27th floor office so we didn’t need to waste money on the London Eye
“On Tuesday Sun delisted itself from the Nasdaq Stock Market, a sign that the (Oracle) takeover was nearly complete, though no formal announcement was made.”
Guess it won’t be long now…
In the midst of all the hype, speculation and (in many cases) nonsense being talked about whatever it is Apple are going to be unveiling next week, it was refreshing to read Scott Berkun’s reminder of why keyboards and mice definitely won’t be going away anytime soon.
(His follow-up post, about the Limits of Innovation, is worth a read too.)
The OpenOffice.org guys are doing some interesting analysis as part of their Project Renaissance UI improvement project. This click map caught my eye this week (click to see the whole thing):
More information on what they’re doing can be found over on the GullFOSS Blog.
Didn’t blog about this at the time as I guessed anyone who was interested would be on the usability list anyway, but in retrospect that’s probably not true so I’ll summarise here as well.
Just prior to the Boston Summit, mostly in response to some prodding from Brian, a few of us started kicking around some ideas for dragging GNOME’s usability activities into the 21st century. General areas for discussion include:
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Anyway, if you want to join in the discussion, it’s mostly happening over here.
This sort of thing always worries me. I really wish we had a more formal way of alerting users that functionality was going to go away, rather than just pulling the rug from under their feet when they install a new release.
At Sun, and I’m sure at most other companies that support software products, we have to tell our customers in advance when (certain) features are going away. We can’t just drop them from one release to the next because we’ve gone off the idea.
Personally, I’d like to see GNOME manage this a lot better, perhaps (from the end user’s perspective) via a section in the GNOME release notes that said which features we intended to remove from the next release. The impact of such changes would then have to be thought through well in advance, and there’d be plenty of time to remove the feature, fix any related issues, and properly update the documentation prior to its actual disappearance. And users would have time to prepare for the change, and have the opportunity to raise any sensible objections before the fact, rather than after it.
(This thought isn’t especially new, nor directly aimed at the proposed Windows capplet removal… although I do know that’s a decision that would generate support calls for Sun users and customers, who always scream when anything related to their sloppy focus settings breaks, changes or goes away. Many of them have been using sloppy focus on UNIX desktops since before GNOME or even Linux were first thought of, so it’s not a feature we like to mess with…)
Quick follow-up on my last post about some ideas for a GNOME control center refresh.
Kristin and Jenya are running a usability study on three control center designs in the Sun labs this week (current GNOME control center as a baseline, plus two of their alternative designs). There will be 10 participants over three days, a mixture of “developers, technical end users, and technical students”.
We will of course share the results as soon as we have any to share
