Outdoor hot tub on cold, wet and windy Irish summer afternoon? Check.
Category: GNOME
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 
Cool idea, but…
Any chance the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach poster could drop the “Linux” bit? Or did I just imagine that we spent the last six years fixing, distributing and supporting GNOME on Solaris?
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.
Disruption
Part of the reason StarOffice (and by association, OpenOffice.org) is “just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing“, of course, is that whenever Sun tries to take out feature X, customer Y complains and stops buying it. Being disruptive is so much easier when you’re starting from scratch with nothing to lose
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:
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:
Using nautilus in spatial mode, we get this different content and ordering again– and a third different term for the home folder:
And using nautilus in Browse mode, the Places sidebar and Go menu don’t even agree with each other, let alone anything else:
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…?
Ack! FUI!
Glynn mentioned Marney’s departure1 and her Bonehead List… just to remind folks we’ve had a (slightly older and slightly GNOME-ised) version of this list on the GUP website for a couple of years, which I’d encourage everyone to think about before they start a new project. It’s interesting to see how the list has evolved since Marney worked in the Accessibility Program Office, and as Sun have become even more involved with open source projects… I should probably update the list on the GUP website accordingly.
1Which I’m also sad about… Marney was one of the people who interviewed me for my job at Sun, and was my dotted-line manager for a couple of years.
Very disappointed to discover that bzr isn’t actually pronounced "beezer" (as in "ya beezer!")
What’s wrong with them?!
My one contribution to the whole “designing by committee” furore is going to be this: I actually quite like those paintings, in a surrealist sort of way. (Only the “most wanted” ones though, not the “least wanted”.)
Online documentation
As one of those people who complained about the HTML output of DocBook recently, it’s good to see Shaun kickstarting some progress on this.
I think my main concern with those mockups is the line length… in English, ten words is about the most you can fit on a line before reading speed slows down. This isn’t so much of an issue for stuff that turns up in help browsers, as the narrow width of the window naturally restricts this anyway, but it’s a problem for things like the HIG that are normally read in a web browser. I’ve tried to deal with this in the draft HIG’s stylesheet recently by indenting the body text from both sides of the page, which also makes it easier to pick out headers. (Example)
My main gripe with the HTML version of large DocBook documents, though, is the lack of a navigation sidebar. Things like the HIG are a pain in the bahookie to jump around, when every other major online styleguide (Mac, WIndows, Java) makes it simple.
