The GNOME doc team has been having a doc sprint in sunny Norwich, England. I arrived a day late due to crazy snow in Cincinnati, but the team’s been hard at work all week. As usual, there’ve been plenty of feature requests for Mallard, which I’ve been trying to keep track of. I’ve tried to encourage people to join the Mallard mailing list and to file Mallard enhancement proposals. Kat asked for a feature in yelp-tools to check licenses of Mallard page files. I’ve added a “license” subcommand to yelp-check. This is in git master, and I’ll get docs up on the wiki after the next release.
I also wrote a new tutorial on Mallard conditionals. It’s hosted with the rest of the Mallard tutorials on projectmallard.org, and I hope we can adapt it to a chapter on conditionals in the Mallard book. In other Mallard news, Ryan’s been pushing me to resume my work on my non-XML Mallard markdown, so that might see some work soon.
We had our semi-annual discussion about the state of our developer docs and what we can do to fix them. As usual, a lot of problems were identified and a lot of ideas were tossed around, but we never seem to revamp things quite to the level I’d like. Maybe this time will be different.
Allan Day joined us for a few days. I enjoyed working with him on redesigning Yelp. Hopefully Yelp 3.12 will look more like a modern GNOME 3 app. Aside from the chrome of Yelp, Allan took a crack at designing a splash page for the desktop help that has a bit more visual appeal. I’ve been working on implementing this for the last two days. Everybody loves screenshots:
Following our tradition of naming special page styles after our hackfests, this is currently accomplished with the “norwich” style on links elements, along with some uix:thumbs elements on the target pages. Petr’s been pushing me to get thumbnails out of experimental and into Mallard UI proper. Hopefully I can find time to carry through on this after the hackfest.
Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel, and to the University of East Anglia for their wonderful hospitality.
