Re: Call for 2.2 Screenshots

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 01:00:01PM +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> For the GNOME 2.2.0 release announcement, as well as having
> functionality-specific screenshots such as the stuff here
> http://www.gnome.org/start/2.1/
> we'd like to show people the usual collection of impressive, pretty, and
> ocassionally wacky full desktop screenshots. So please reply with URLs
> of your GNOME 2.2 screenshots before February 5th. Please don't use
> backgrounds that we are likely to get complaints about.

Side note, on the start page, can you avoid the term metatheme; that
term should die die die. It's just "theme"

How about changing the paragraph to something like:

 In GNOME 2.2, a "theme" is now a collection of subthemes, such as 
 icon subtheme, GTK+ subtheme, and metacity subtheme. Theme authors 
 can distribute a complete coordinated package, letting you transform 
 your whole desktop with a single download. And it's easy to become a 
 theme author: just set up your desktop, click "Save Theme," and 
 upload the theme to your web site.

Also, the "start" page is not nearly long enough; there are *lots*
more little things we could mention. I'd suggest making a screenshot
of those things, rather than just random shots.

On a high level, suggest organizing by feature, not by "panel" and
"nautilus" - if you organize by feature, the features get more
attention, and your number of subheads grows with the feature list,
and isn't bounded by the size of the module list. ;-) Also some
features may span modules.

Here are some other things we could mention, just a start, some are
already there I guess:

 - metacity (it's new in this release)
 - vte (full AA text, full unicode, no flicker)
 - Network Servers
 - the notification area
 - the show desktop button
 - xrandr support - dynamically adapts to resolution changes
 - CD burning thingy
 - transparent panel (as much as it pains me)
 - startup notification

I would also suggest a "preview" section showing fontilus, gucharmap,
rpm view, etc.  "already working for 2.4"

In addition to new things some part of the page should mention old
things that are GNOME strengths; stuff like accessibility, gconf,
simplicity, speed, whatever. At least one section title should contain
the words "business" or "enterprise" - jdub probably has good ideas
for features to mention there.

All the screenshots should be "nice" rather than "leet" - subjective I
know, if in doubt ask tigert and jimmac. ;-)

Finally I would add an applications section, "applications for GNOME," 
in which we list and have screenshots for things like AbiWord,
Gnumeric, etc., since GNOME is not a giant umbrella project, it's
intended to be used with lots of other pieces.

</marketing>

Basically, with a little work we can make people far more excited
about 2.2 than they will be reading the current page.

Havoc