Category: GNOME

Hey Presto!

Or, “Solaris printing finally makes it into the 21st century”.Check out Norm’s screencast of the first working bits of the automatic printer detection and config system that we’re working on for OpenSolaris. Only works for local USB printers right now, but loads more functionality to come over the next few months. Kudos to the printing team– Norm, Wendy (who doesn’t have a blog, AFAIK), Ghee and Halton*– for finally nailing one of the most-neglected parts of the Solaris user experience.

*Okay, so I’ve been helping a bit too…

Och-aye-demy

Just noticed that KDE’s Akademy conference is taking place in my old stomping ground of Strathyclyde University’s Computer Science Department in Glasgow… pity there are no usability sessions on the schedule, might have been tempted to gatecrash for nostalgia’s sake 🙂

Back in my day (1989-93), the Graham Hills building was called Marland House (we’d just bought it off BT), and its main function was to house a lab full of QLs that Sinclair had donated. Despite the stories in the press at the time, every student didn’t get one to take home– AFAIK they all stayed in the lab, and all we ever did with them was our 68k assembly language assignments (as set by Duncan Smeed, who’s probably still setting them today…)

The top few floors of the Livingstone Tower, on the other hand, housed (as they still do) the staff offices and the 3rd and 4th year computer lab, which at the time had just been kitted out with smart new Sun terminals (ELCs, IIRC– which looking back at them now were the forerunner of Sun Rays, I guess). Little did I know then…

The Doctor is In?

So, a combination of seeing Ross’s GUADEC call for papers, and reading the Ask Doctor Usability column in the latest edition of the ACM’s Interactions magazine that flopped through my door the other day, sparked a thought.

Would there be any interest in a GUADEC session where people could bring along applications they were working on, and have a quick on-the-spot expert review by some usability folks? (Or ask for advice generally, but reviewing something tangible might be more productive in a limited amount of time, and more interesting if anyone was voyeuristic enough to come and watch.)

I’m not saying I’d be the best person to run such a thing mind you– I’m terrible at giving instant opinions, I much prefer to go away and think about things for a few days 🙂

Themely reminder

Hacked up a quick script today to help me pinpoint which icons were missing from the accessibility themes. As a sideshow, I had it point out which .desktop and .directory files (as installed by Solaris nv_53) had hard-coded pathnames and/or icon filename suffixes, both of which can break themeing.

It found 61 with hard-coded suffixes, and 6 with hard-coded pathnames (although the only non-Sun ones in the latter category came from gksu)… so, if you maintain a .desktop file, please remember to have its Icon line look something like:

Icon=gksu-root-terminal

rather than

Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/gksu-root-terminal.png

to ensure maximium themability. (And preferably install generic icons in the hicolor theme rather than the deprecated /usr/share/pixmaps anyway.)

Anyway, back to the real work generated by the script– the 70+ missing High Contrast icons it spotted (not to mention the 120 Low Contrast icons). Oh for the day when this proposal is adopted…

Lost in translation

Spotted this slightly depressing IRC snippet tucked away on the GNOME marketing-list yesterday:

(03:42:26 PM) danilo: qgil: as a matter of fact, other approaches bring
results we had with documentation for the past 4 years: no documentation
has been translated to any language except for Sun contributed
translations, and they were too hard to update because we only had
docbook source on them

(03:42:48 PM) danilo: so, basically, we had to dump almost all of sun contributed translations

Could Sun have done more to avoid this? Were we made aware of the problem at the time? We still do sucky things occasionally, especially in the corners of the company (including L10N) who don’t yet live and breathe open source in the way most of us do now, but I certainly hope we can learn from any mistakes we made here.