Category: GNOME

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.

GStreamer hackfest Thursday

<bilboed> GStreamer hackfest tomorrow at 12:00 in Carpa.
<bilboed> Is there somebody who has planet gnome access and who could blog about the GStreamer hackfest ?
<bilboed> calum, could you specify all the main gstreamer hackers will be there... please ? :) Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey, Tim Muller, Thomas Vander Stichele, ...

Consider it done 🙂

That was close…

Kudos to the Thunderbird team for adding a neck-saving feature (maybe it’s been there forever, but I’ve only just encountered it tonight)… an alert that pops up when you try to send a mail using the keyboard shortcut rather than clicking Send. How I’ve laughed in the past whenever I’ve sent incomplete/embarrassing/borderline-litigious emails by mistake (usually when trying to use some other keyboard shortcut, followed by Enter) before I’d counted to ten and rewritten them 🙂

Now, you could well argue that it’s a poor shortcut (Cmd-Enter on Mac, presumably Ctrl-Enter on others) that’s easy to hit by mistake. But it’s kind of a standard one these days, so the warning is appreciated in the meantime until they pick a better one.

All over the Places

While working on a proposal for desktop defaults for our next version of the Java Desktop System, I’ve been somewhat perturbed by the mess that our concept of “Places” is in.

These screenshots are from Ubuntu Dapper as I’m on my Powerbook at the moment, but IIRC the vanilla community version isn’t significantly different (except for the Documents ‘place’ that Ubuntu has– but we have that in JDS too so that’s part of my problem as well). I have one bookmark and a few network places set up– this is one of my everyday, working desktops, so my experiences are presumably fairly typical.

The user’s first encounter is most likely on the Places menu on the panel:

Places submenu on main menu

Then when they open a file, they get this collection of Places instead– now their bookmarks are at the bottom, and they can choose from devices that weren’t available on the Places menu:

Places sidebar in file selector

Using nautilus in spatial mode, we get this different content and ordering again– and a third different term for the home folder:

Places menu in nautilus spatial mode

And using nautilus in Browse mode, the Places sidebar and Go menu don’t even agree with each other, let alone anything else:

Places sidebar and Go menu in nautilus browse mode

Now, obviously a wee bit of context sensitivity is appropriate… in the file selector, you’re unlikely to want to open files from the CD Burner or Trash locations for example (although I’d be quite happy to allow opening from Trash– I always get annoyed at OSes that force you to drag things out the trash before you can look at them again). But surely we can do a better job of consistency here overall? My Places are my Places wherever I’m accessing them, and in general I’d expect to see the same ones in the same order.

Or is it just me…?