Michael Monreal

I am very excited about the upcoming GNOME 2.24 release.There’s lots of nice new stuff, but here is what I am especially looking forward to:

Nautilus

• Tabs
• fixed DnD
• Restore from trash
• Improved removable media eject and insert handling

Evolution

• Speed (!)
• More Tango icon and general UI love
• Gmail contacts

This is kind of a follow up to my own post from a few days ago.

Yesterday, my parents needed to watch a picture DVD and their DVD-Player was unable to handle the disc. I resurrected my old first-generation Centrino laptop and installed Ubuntu Hardy and Elisa. My parents really liked the simple UI and I’m sure they would like to use something similar for their other PC use cases: web browsing, email and word processing.

Now let’s assume GTK+/GNOME applications were flexible enough to seamlessly integrate into such a mediacenter-like environment (using some alternate, simplified GUI markup for example). We could easily build a mediacenter-desktop mix, which IMHO would please a lot of users (not the regular geek, but children and the older generation!). Such a product would be nice for devices like the Eee and perfect for those Wii-shaped mini-computers some companies have started selling recently.

Even if this mediacenter-desktop thing is just some stupid idea of myself, I really think GNOME needs to be able to better adapt to the needs of the future… and “the desktop” as we know it today will only be a (small?) part of that.

Again everyone seems to be talking about one topic, so here’s my $ 0.02.

After reading through most of the posts and comments, it seems like there are some fundamental differences in how people a thinking about GNOME. Some seem to think of it only as a desktop (either “corporate” or not) while for others GNOME has a much wider scope. Another group seems to have a focus on the platform and yet others see GNOME more as an evolving process rather than a product. But who is right?

Of cause there is no right or wrong here. As part of a community it is only natural that everyone has his or her own personal motivations and goals. But in the end we all want to keep the GNOME project alive and also want it to be successful. So, what are my personal opionions about this? Well, I don’t think we need a radically different “Topaz” or “3.0” release. But still I think GNOME should move on to the “next level” soon. How does this fit together?

Rodney had some very nice thoughts about “the desktop”. I really think we should take this into account for “3.0”. We need to be more flexible in the future, and we need to be able to adapt to new hardware devices and usage models. Yet I don’t think “the desktop” will die anytime soon, so we should also work to improve things in this direction. Read: we have not yet reached the full potential of what we could achieve. The question is: what can we still do within the “2.x” release series? Some people have voted for small incremental updates over multiple cycles if needed, which is good. But this has been practiced during “2.x” all the time, one way or another. Truth is that at some point, we really need to make a cut and enter this “next level” I was talking about earlier.

Now, some concrete visions:

• Platform: Let’s finish Project Ridley ASAP and see what other changes the core libraries need to serve as the base of GNOME for the next 10 years. Yes, a base for “the desktop” as well as other/new use cases. I assume “core libraries” in this context mostly means GLib/GTK+ “3.0”, but perhaps we also need to tie in things like Clutter? Do we need a gconf-ng as part of glib? I’m sure there are a few more things that need to be addressed. Anyway, this will also be the opportunity to get rid of legacy stuff and clean up things a bit, which will make it easier for new contributers to get started. I think we have waited about as long as we can with this move. If we don’t bring the platform to the next level within the next 1-2 years I think we will lose both supporters and users.

• Core Desktop: As “core desktop” components I see the panel, applets (containing notifications, hardware stuff), as well as the file manager. Those core components should work together more closely in “3.0”. Again, no radical changes should be made but we should start seeing panel/applets/nautilus as one unit (not just individual modules) and improve all the common workflows. The whole thing should still be flexible but it should not have the “pieced together” feeling of the current desktop. We also should rethink some parts: the emblem system in Nautilus would be a good start. We should also aim to integrate some add-on apps (or their functionality) better with the core components: Deskbar and Do are both very nice and usable applications but we already (still?) have the old run and find dialogs. We also have separate GUIs for Beagle and Tracker in addition to that. Why can’t we just have a single super-usable run and find GUI (using Xesam for querying Beagle and/or Tracker) integrated with panel and nautilus? I’m sure we can! Finally, people were also talking about better OS integration and hardware interaction. We can surely still improve things here but we are already well on the way: compare WLAN and Bluetooth handling now and two years ago for example. Ideally GNOME would feel like “the OS” instead of “the DE”, just like Aqua feels more like “the OS” rather than just a GUI on top of BSD. But this is something we can aim to improve during “3.x”, after migrating to the new platform

• Applications: Apps would need to be adapted to platform changes of cause but in most cases I think we have some really nice apps already. There are, however, two things to consider. First, GTK2 GUIs tend to have a quite “boxy” look. I think we need to change something in the guideliens for things like spacing and background areas to make apps look and feel smoother. Some nicer stock widgets (ListView anyone?) and use of app-speciffic widgets could help, too. Second, applications should have the ability to make use of advanced toolkit features as seen in Banshee 1.0 in places where it makes sense: sliding widgets, pulsing items, kinetic scrolling… this is *not* useless bling. It really helps the user to interact smoothly and naturally with the application. Besides, a pleasant look never hurts. Same for “Compiz” effects btw: while I totally agree that about 90% of the plugins are only useful in “see what I can do”-demo scenarios, some actually have a use. Things like transparency, shadows and animations can greatly improve the user experience – if used correctly.

That’s all for now.