Category: GNOME

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.

Model Behaviour

I do wish mobile phone companies (well, Nokia in particular) would print model numbers somewhere on all their handsets. I’ve had three different ones now, and every time I go to buy an accessory, I can never remember which one I’ve got. (I think I currently have a 3100, and Julie has a 3220… but it could quite conceivably be the other way around. Or neither.)

"Don’t you just love being in control?"

I don’t know who designed the heating system in our house, but they could do with attending a usability course or two.

We have a gas combi boiler, which has three controls. One is a master on/off switch, with two settings– “off” and “radiators” (according to the icons). The second is a thermostat, with no numerical legend, just another “radiator” icon. The third is a 24-hour timer with those annoying tiny pins you have to pop in and out, which also has its own three-setting on/off switch (on, off and timed).

On top of that, there’s a thermostat in the hall with temperature markings on it, and a lever beside the hot tank to switch between “radiators and water” and “water only”. Add to that the variable controls on the radiators themselves, and it certainly becomes quite a challenge to decide what to adjust when you’re feeling a bit chilly.

Anyway, right now we have it set to “water only”, and all the radiators are off, as it’s 25C+ outside most days at the moment. This morning, I went for a shower (which takes the water from the hot tank), and there was no hot water…. the combi boiler hadn’t come on in the early hours like it was supposed to. Went downstairs, checked the gas supply on the cooker… fine. Switched the timer switch from ‘timed’ to ‘on’, which should light the gas immediately… nothing. Tried switching the boiler off and back on again… nothing. Pressed the Reset button… nothing. The boiler doesn’t have a pilot light, so I knew that wasn’t the problem. And the front is screwed on, which suggested I shouldn’t really try poking around in it.

Was on the verge of calling a heating engineer when I decided that the only control I hadn’t played with was the thermostat in the hall, which was set to a reasonable enough 24C (if you disregard the fact that the radiators are turned off anyway). Turned it down… nothing. Turned it up, and… click, the boiler lit up. That’s right, in our house you can’t have hot water unless the radiator-controlling thermostat is set to something above room temperature, even when the radiators have been turned off for months. Marvellous.

Dliute to taste

Today, I heard about something on our wiki that I should probably have known about months ago. But I have no real way of knowing when somebody adds something that might interest me, unless they announce it somewhere at the time, or happen to tag it with one of the categories I’ve asked for notifications about. (Most wikis have a recent changes feed, ours currently doesn’t, but I don’t have time to read my feeds more than a couple of times a week anyway, so I could easily miss stuff that way too.)

With the GNOME web team embarking on a re-think of its web presence, perhaps it’s time to think about the distribution of “live” information around the project generally. As it is, I just about have time to keep track of mailing lists and bugzilla. I only monitor a tiny number of IRC channels, I don’t have time to read planet.gnome.org often enough to guarantee that I won’t miss something interesting, I’ve never read the GNOME Journal, and I probably manage to glance at our support forums about once every couple of months– particularly unfortunate as they’re probably about our best source of end-user feedback, but I just find web-based forums such a drag to use1. Sun’s own JDS forum has the same problem.

So, how are we supposed to keep ourselves well-informed, and still have time to do some real work? In the past I’ve advocated “feedback meisters” who would trawl all those sources and collate user feedback into a central repository (maybe bugzilla, maybe not), so we could all be safe in the knowledge that we weren’t missing anything important from our users. But sometimes it feels like it’s getting to the stage where we need something like that just to keep in touch with what our fellow contributors are up to… and that can’t be good, can it?

1 I’ve just discovered this somewhat hidden RSS feed, which helps a little, but it’s limited to 20 items and topic titles only, so I’m still likely to miss a lot of things that way too.