Category: GNOME

Red cheese

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? :/

CHI 2008

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:

  • I/we really need to get the HIG moving again, preferably in a less monolithic fashion
  • It will be really cool to see what sort of insight the InGimp data analysis gives us, and whether it would be feasible/worthwhile transferring the idea to GNOME.
  • There still really aren’t many people working on open source usability projects, even in academia :/

Seven new pennies

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?

OO.o website

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.

Media at your fingertips

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.  It’s built into the file selection dialog, too:

 Mail.app media browser  PulpMotion media browser  iMovie media browser  Open File dialog

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.

HOPG – HIG screenshots

So, I’ve just noticed that some of the Google HOPG tasks involve updating the HIG screenshots.  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 :) 

Four OSes, One Mac Redux

Seems the Theora version really didn’t want to play outside of Quicktime. Courtesy of ffmpeg, here’s a DivX version that works in VLC on Gutsy out of the box, at least (just checked it)… poorer quality and the aspect ratio’s gone a bit squiffy, but what the heck. I don’t really function properly before 10am, and it’s really not that exciting anyway :)

EDIT: Thanks to Arek for pointing out the blindingly obvious, here’s a proper Linux and Solaris-friendly OGG version. Yay :)

Sun’s Web App UI Guidelines

Cool to see Sun’s Web App UI Guidelines finally go public. As Chip Alexander says,:

They are a set of building blocks for web applications that have been designed by user interface specialists, thoroughly thought through and usability tested. They can be used for developing full web applications, allowing designers and developers to focus on their application’s particular needs rather than the design of all the controls and elements inside.

The corresponding Woodstock toolkit for which they were written has been available under an open source (CDDL) licence for a while, but of course the guidelines themselves can be applied to any web app. (They do have a bit of a system administration app slant, though, for obvious reasons.)