There probably aren’t many better places to have a beer and talk about GNOME, the universe and everything.
EDIT: Bit of a poor show on the communications front though– we knew nothing about the cake until it was finished (and have only just learned from Michael’s blog what it was for), or that we only had a few minutes to get off the boat the first time before it headed out again…
A handful of my other photos of the evening on Flickr.
Like many of you, I’m sorting myself out tonight to fly to what will be my seventh GUADEC in Istanbul tomorrow. (I’ll actually be there for two weeks, as my wife is flying out after the conference to join me for a week’s vacation.)
Pleased that there’s a very healthy crowd of Sun desktop folks attending this year (18 at last count), and rumour has it we’ll have some OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCDs to be giving away, so you can play along live with John Rice’s talk 🙂 Hopefully I’ll also find a few interesting things to snap with the Lomo Fisheye camera I got for my birthday last month…
I started writing this as a comment on Andy’s post, but it ended up quite long so I decided to blog it instead 🙂
From a user’s perspective, I’m inclined to agree—to put it bluntly, I can’t really recall the last major innovation I saw on my GNOME desktop. After all these years, we’re still mostly working on things that Windows and, more recently, OS X, can do for us already if we’re prepared to pay Apple or Microsoft for the privilege.
Clutter is one such example—it’s a promising technology for developers, and maybe it will turn out to be a “way out” of the “decadence” Andy describes. But if we just use it to write clones of Front Row or CoverFlow or any of Apple’s other CoreAnimation-based apps, then Apple will have moved on again by the time we’re finished and we’ll just be playing catch-up again.
In any case, Clutter is just a toolkit, and toolkits don’t help us with the vague lack of coherence and integration on some parts of our desktop today, or the need for more clarity of purpose going forward. For that I applaud Havoc et al.’s vision of an online desktop—while it’s not one that desperately excites me personally, I don’t have anything better to propose, and having everybody focusing on something is surely better than nobody focusing on anything 🙂
As for the HIG—I really don’t believe that it stifles creativity any more than (say) Apple’s HIG stifles theirs, but it probably has been a victim of it’s own success to some extent. It was written six years ago, and as such, it describes the best practices for six-year-old GNOME apps. We do have plans to substantially revamp it, but it won’t happen overnight.
That said, the HIG shouldn’t drive major changes in GNOME’s UI, it should reflect them. But at the same time, the gtk guys (and others) need to know what changes to make for 3.0 that will support the sort of changes we might want to make going forward.
Everybody probably just needs to get talking and generate ideas to move that process along again, but I also wonder if maybe we don’t have enough rockstars in our community right at the moment—it’s much easier to reach a goal when two or three people are driving you there, than when a hundred people are all trying to make their own way.
I’ve been pretty badly neglecting my community duties recently… I have a backlog of ~2000 usability and HIG bugzilla emails to get through, and haven’t fixed any gnome-themes bugs in months. (I have at least started updating all the HIG images with the ones we got from the GHOPpers at the turn of the year, but still a good bit of work to do there, too.)
Sorry about that. I started making a bit of an effort this week to try and get through at least 10 of those bugzilla mails a day, and uploaded a few more of those HIG images last night too. I hope to continue in that vein for the next few weeks, at least…
Daniel, I suppose the first question is “why does it need to be red?” Anything that animates is going to catch the user’s attention anyway, so I don’t see any great harm in keying the background to the theme.
That said, since gtk+ 2.10, haven’t themes been able to support additional named colours, to highlight things like ‘errors’ and ‘warnings’ where appropriate? So shouldn’t Clearlooks and the other themes be providing these now? Or did we just never decide what the standard list of named colours should be? :/
Back in Dublin after spending last week at CHI 2008 in Florence. I posted a few entries over on Sun’s design blog while I was there: [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3] [Day 4]
Main takeaways of GNOME interest, in no particular order:
Not liking the new British coins all that much, I have to say.
Apart from the fact they look a lot like the cardboard money that I used to have in my toy cash register many years ago, they don’t look very friendly to tourists who might have little or no English, and/or just bad eyesight. I’d have thought the first rule of currency design would be to use biggish numbers, not just (in some cases, tiny) words?
The new OpenOffice.org website is quite a nice piece of work—or at least, the homepage is, I haven’t dug much further yet.
Okay, so I don’t really like the box up in the top corner, either visually or functionally. But other than that, the front page does all the right things very simply, and unlike GNOME’s you don’t have to scroll past a big (albeit attractive) graphic to read the main text content. Nice job.
Was just pondering in the shower at the weekend (as you do) about what makes, say, MacOS X feel like a more cohesive desktop than even the latest and greatest GNOME.
One thing that came to mind was its integrated management of your media– in pretty much any Mac app where you might want to insert or edit multimedia content, you can immediately access your entire music, photo or video library in a familiar-looking window and drag it over from there. Â It’s built into the file selection dialog, too:
Of course, Apple only really let you manage your media library with their own software: iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut etc. But it did get me wondering if there was a place for a freedesktop ‘media library’ spec, that would offer our users the same sort of quick, searchable access to their media content (be it local, remote, stored on Flickr, split across three DVDs, or any combination of the above) in any application that required it. And, of course, to do what Apple doesn’t, and allow any app to manage that content, if it needs to do so.
So, I’ve just noticed that some of the Google HOPG tasks involve updating the HIG screenshots. Â I don’t know if the other HIG authors were alerted to this, but I certainly wasn’t.
Apart from a degree of discourtesy to the HIG authors, this oversight is surely particularly unhelpful to the people who claimed the tasks, as the maintainers who will ultimately decide if their work is fit for inclusion have not been around to offer advice as they were going along.
Also, FWIW, the draft version of the HIG already has several updated screenshots in it, so hopefully nobody has wasted their time duplicating those.  I’ll review what I can this week, but this is my last working week this year and I have other stuff taking priority.  So maybe Bryan, Seth, Anna etc. could help out here too, if they’re reading 🙂Â
  
  
  