Category: gnome

Context-sensitive menus

I was just wondering why do we show disabled menu items in a context-sensitive menu? In this case, showing disabled operations to the user doesn’t bring any useful information. For example, have a look at this context-sensitive menu for a mounted USB stick in the Nautilus desktop area (see bug 522739):

context-menu.png

What’s the point of showing all those disabled items? If it’s a context-sensitive menu, it should show only actions that make sense it that context, right?

I see the point of having disabled menu items in a main menubar for the sake of bringing awereness of all available actions in an application. However, for context-sensitive menus, it just doesn’t make any sense. Am I missing something?

GNOME Foundation Annual Report 2007 released!

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In 2006, Dave Neary and others started this new tradition by producing the first GNOME Foundation annual report which has got very positive response from community. So, we decided to follow the new tradition by preparing the GNOME Foundation annual report 2007!

I’ve been slowly working on it for a few months with invaluable contributions from several people. The report is now available (1860 KB, PDF) in GNOME Foundation’s website.

We’ll soon send nice hard copies of the report to the Advisory Board members and existing GNOME event boxes. Our plan is to also print a bunch of extra copies to be used for promoting GNOME on events around the world. Feel free to request some copies for your local GNOME event.

This year, we chose Lulu.com as the printing service in order to allow us to easily print more copies on demand and to make it possible to anyone to order personal hard copies by just paying for the printing (the price goes 100% to Lulu.com, no revenues to GNOME Foundation). You can buy a hard copy of this report directly from Lulu.com here.

Many thanks to:

  • the writers: Federico Mena-Quintero, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Vincent Untz and Behdad Esfahbod;
  • the photographers: Frederic Crozat, Michael Dominic, Vincent Untz, Kushal Das, Juan Carlos Inostroza and Garrett LeSage;
  • the designer: Andreas Nilsson;
  • the text reviewers: Paul Cutler and Stephanie Watson;
  • the adviser: Dave Neary.

I hope you enjoy it!

Update 1: In the first paragraph, when I wrote “Last year”, I actually meant “In 2006”. I fixed this to add clarity. :-)

Update 2: The price for printing the report at Lulu.com doesn’t include any revenue to the GNOME Foundation! That’s the price of the printing service which goes 100% to Lulu.com! Yes, it’s relatively expensive.

FOSDEM

It’s been more than 2 weeks since FOSDEM and I haven’t written anything about it…

As I said before, this was my first FOSDEM. I have to say that it is a really nice FLOSS conference. It’s different than any other conference I’ve ever attended before because it’s very focused on communities and development.

I arrived on Friday morning with some other Nokians (Tommi, Marius, Daniel, Johan, Lassi and Zeeshan). It was pretty nice to arrive early because we had the whole day for some sightseeing in Brussels. Found Vincent walking randomly in the city and we had this nice chat about collaboration, communities, GNOME, Nokia,  roadmap, etc. The beer event in the evening was fun but too packed.

I prefered to stay most of the time in the GNOME booth and because of that I didn’t see many talks. This was a nice way to meet a lot of new people and hang out with some old GNOME fellows. The OLPC’s XO brought a lot of curious people to our booth. We sold quite many t-shirts and distributed a lot of promotion materials. I saw Ken’s talk about GNOME Developer Kit and Emmanuele‘s talk about Clutter talk. Both quite interesting. It’s very nice to see OH guys trying to bring the case of Clutter as an animation framework for desktop applications. We need to explore this more. It seems that Havoc has some interesting ideas on this regard (to be discussed during the GTK+ Hackfest this week). Unfortunately, I missed Alp’s WebKit talk. Vincent and I had this quick chat with Cornelius Schumacher (from KDE e.V.) about possible paths for collaboration between GNOME and KDE.

Thanks everyone who made my first FOSDEM a really nice experience! I took some pictures, all of them are in this album.

GNOME @ Google Summer of Code 2008

As you probably know, Google is organizing one more edition of their Summer of Code (GSoC) program.

GNOME has participated in all GSoC editions as a mentoring organization with some nice results in terms of contributions and new contributors. So, we want to participate this year too!

Our first organization kickoff meeting will happen on March 6 at 18h UTC in the -admin channel (irc.gnome.org). We’re looking for volunteers to help us to organize GNOME’s participation in GSoC 2008. So, if you want to help in any way, join us!

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility

As Behdad has already said, we’ve been working on this cool GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility for the past three months. The program organized and promoted by the GNOME Foundation and sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Canonical, Google, and Novell. Read the program’s press release. The tasks will be published on March 1st.

This is a very nice opportunity to contribute to a highly relevant part of GNOME. Participate!

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