Category: Work

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…?

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.

Nexenta

Notwithstanding some (fairly pointless, IMHO) debate about the open-ness or otherwise of having to register for its pilot programme, Nexenta looks like being one of the most exciting projects to spring from OpenSolaris so far.

First Irish OpenSolaris User Group Meeting

This just in from Fintan:

Thanks to Jamie O'Leary of DIT Netsoc we have a venue
available for the first Irish OpenSolaris meeting.

So, the time and venue
	
	DIT, Kevin St @ 6:30, Tuesday 27th Sept

Primary Speaker 

	Darren Moffat, Solaris Security Architect

and then a general discussion on what people would
like to get out of the UG.

Further details and directions for the exact location in
DIT will be sent out before the UG meeting.

Wooden anniversary

I’ve been at Sun in Dublin for five years now (well, as of last week or so)… which is actually the longest I’ve worked for any one company. (My previous record was four years with Logica, now LogicaCMG, in Cambridge, but much of that time was spent full time on-site at Reuters in London, and then at the NATS air traffic management R&D centre near Bournemouth, so that felt more like two or three separate jobs anyway.)

When I joined, Sun shares were trading at over $50. Now it’s an event in itself when they pop their head above $4. So what’s kept me here? Well, it’s certainly not the share options 🙂

Primarily it’s the work. Open source software usability still brings a new challenge practically every day, and I’ve been doing it for five years now. I’d also like to think that, along with the rest of the GNOME usability folks, we’ve blazed a bit of a trail… albeit one that’s wandered about a bit, and still isn’t quite sure where it’s headed.

Of course, you need smart and motivated people around and above you to achieve things anywhere, and Sun has more than its fair share of those. That’s not to say there isn’t as much politics, bureaucracy and (just occasionally) downright frustrating dithering as you’ll find at any other company, large or small, but for such a globally-distributed company (the JDS team alone has engineers in Ireland, the USA, Canada, Germany, China, India and New Zealand), we cut through it pretty well. And right now the whole software organisation is pulling in the same direction more strongly than at any other time I can remember.

Dublin is still a decent enough place to live too, even though the locals will tell you that the Celtic Tiger has turned it into a soulless shell of its oul’ self. And only in Ireland would they spend hundreds of millions of euro on a new tram system that has two lines that don’t join up, and a sub-city tunnel to take trucks out of the city centre that isn’t high enough to accommodate a lot of them. But that’s all part of its charm, I guess.

Oh, and we get to choose our own five year service award from a decent enough list– I’ve gone for one of these…