Gah… somebody at Sun sent me a link to an article that he thought might be useful background reading for my possible OSS Usability article for Interfaces, and now I can’t find the email. If you’re reading this, can you send it again please?!
Category: Usability
GIMP usability
Alan Horkan (link still b0rked at time of posting) pointed us at a sneak preview of the results of a GIMP usability study by Relevantive today. How far open source usability has come that such a thing was even contemplated… and how far we’ve still got to go 
Fame at last
Was invited this morning to write an article about open source usability for the British Computer Society’s quarterly HCI journal, Interfaces. Hopefully I’ll have time to do something more than just a re-hash of our recent CHI paper…
Contrasting Fortunes
Have spent most of today hacking away at gnome-themes again, trying to fill in the holes that our accessible themes currently leave on the development branch of JDS. If GNOME is serious about accessibility, ‘provision of a high contrast application icon’ really should be a mimimum integration criterion.
Will be spending the rest of the afternoon sticking my oar into the FTP login and Connect to
Server dialogs again, though, which should be more fun
Vienna photos
Have posted a few photographs (in no particular order, and unedited) from my recent trip to CHI2004 in Vienna, where Matthias, Jiri and I presented a short paper entitled Professional Usability in Open Source Projects: NetBeans, GNOME and OpenOffice.
Top tips
It’s official– I am personally going to throttle the next person who commits a Foobar Preferences menu item to the JDS build tree with the tooltip:
[Configure|Set|Change] your foobar [options|preferences|settings]
:o)
Another week dawns
Hardly any email waiting for me at all, this morning… always a bad sign, means I’ll have to do some work instead. (One of the few was to inform me my actress friend in England has started seeing a new bloke she doesn’t fancy– if I’d known that was her type I’d have asked her out years ago!)
The first public draft of the HIG will apparently be released for review later today. Fortunately I’ve only just picked up my flameproof suit from the dry cleaners.
Bought my first Christmas present at the weekend, as it has to go to America– I promise not to think about Christmas again until about December 17th. Saturday also saw Scotland soundly thrashed by the All Blacks, and Motherwell winning again. The latter is becoming a worrying habit.
Just RIFfing…
Hmm, so little has been happening recently. Work on the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines finally got underway, the mighty Steelmen have themselves a new manager, and Sun have decided to cut 4000 jobs, which may or may not include mine. All will be revealed on November 7th, apparently.
We’ve got Willie on the Wing
A mixed weekend of World Cup football. Ireland pull off a great result against Holland, guaranteeing them a playoff place, and Scotland prolong the qualification agony with a poor goal-less draw with Croatia, leaving us needing to beat Belgium on Wednesday.
(Apparently, England had not a bad result either, but only against a Germany team whose defence I could have cut open myself with a slightly-sharpened sponge).
My bit of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines is finally taking shape– nothing committed to cvs as yet, but at least I’ve finally had time to write something.
HIG: Who’s doing what
So, Michael Schumacher wins another dull race and another dull F1 World Championship, and Motherwell’s dismal start to the new season is relentless. Blissful normality.
Plans to write the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (mini-edition) continue apace, and we’ve now all agreed who’s writing what. I’ve hastily been trying to learn DocBook in preparation for this monumental task, by converting my latest draft of the GNOME Accessibility Guide. “Trivial” and “not” are two words that spring to mind.
