Slowing Time Down

December 6, 2005 2:42 am General

Insane, it’s already Monday again and we’re just about to start the Solaris Desktop performance summit. It’s been a crazy week, so maybe it’s time to reflect a little bit about the previous week’s activities before I plunge head deep into the next round.

I was a bit skeptical at the start of the week with the usability stuff. It’s really easy to spend the entire week talking shit, and at the end of the week have nothing to take home. But it was useful, amazingly useful. Not only has it been an excellent opportunity to meet people from right across the organization, it was a great chance to centralize our vision on our user targets and learn about some of the ways we can go about designing our software on a task based approach.

We had 2 really clueful set of talks from our VP’s Tom Goguen and Glenn Weinberg, and it was really exciting to see how closely aligned they were to the GNOME/JDS vision that we’re trying to create – and echoed many of the things that the Sun desktop team has been saying for many, many years. It’s been hugely motivating for me to hear these guys and chat with the others about the content.

We had a number of brainstorming session that were useful – everything from community relations, single system administration, usability studies, Java on the desktop, printing, Sun Ray, and some desktop sizzle. I hope to do a write up on some of the sessions at a later stage, but one of the highlights of those brainstorming sessions were the way we came up with the issues – brainstorming issues on stickies, and then rotating them around so that others could develop new ideas based on existing suggestions.

I also helped to lead a Usability Gripe session, and came up with a huge list of stuff that really, really sucked on the desktop – everything from our multimedia story, multi-session configuration, fonts, our internal release model and building the sources. It was fricken awesome…okay, there was a huge amount of crack involved, but we identified some of the real pain points people were having with the desktop. I’ll summarize this list formally and blog it later on. At the end of the session we all voted on our favourite issues – a nice fun session.

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