Re: roadmap status update/update request

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

Hi Federico,
Thing is, most of these annoyances you mention --well known annoyances, 
everyone has them actually--, are distro-related, not Gnome-related. For 
example, the video codecs is a legal issue that a distro must decide what to 
do with it. Gnome can not include these codecs, neither fix OOo to default 
to .doc format or fix Firefox to play midi as these are third party apps 
(although this might be a feature that Epiphany might need, as it's part of 
Gnome). I do agree though, Gnome needs to be more in touch with peripheral 
apps and services, in order to feel more coherant and deliver a better 
experience.

As for enthusiasts voting for transparent eye candy instead of things that 
have some substance, this would not happen, for two reasons: 1. The options 
would be pre-configured, based on bugzilla's most wanted feature requests. 
2. Enthusiasts are also users. I mean, I might not work on a European office 
with SuSE Linux or use Gnome in Brazil, but I do use Gnome most of my day at 
home. Why my and many other user's annoyances should not be pointed out as 
well as some professional users?

Anyways, we are getting tiresome to most list members here, let's close the 
thread. I might do a poll on osnews "just for fun" tomorrow, including 15-20 
options, see what people think (this poll wouldn't be representative of 
anything, it would just be a small experiement of mine, so "don't get angry" 
as Havoc afraids devs will be :-).

Eugenia


> From: Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>
> To: Eugenia Loli-Queru <eloli hotmail com>
> CC: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: roadmap status update/update request
> Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 21:21:41 -0600
>
> On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 11:14 -0800, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
>
> Hi, Eugenia,
>
> > The idea was that this would be a Gnome-sponsored poll and it would 
> attract
> > people from many sites, not just osnews or this mailing list. The idea 
> would
> > be to get at least 300,000 people vote (I can get you 50-60,000 voters 
> out
> > of the 250,000 daily osnews readers, the rest must be done via ml, 
> slashdot,
> > gnomedesktop etc).
>
> What would be really valuable is to go out there and do some field
> research.  Ask end users, not enthusiasts, what their top-5 annoyances
> are.  Find a list of big deployments of GNOME (City of Largo, various
> cities in Germany and Spain, Brazilian Telecentros...), get ahold of the
> people in charge of the technical side of the deployments, and *ask*
> them what their users have told them they need.
>
> I'm afraid that a big poll among enthusiasts will list translucent
> animated menus as a top priority.
>
> Let me give you a quick example.  My wife teaches English at a local
> high school; she is definitely not a technical person.  She uses
> whatever software I install on her laptop, which is basically OpenOffice
> on top of <some-linux-distribution>.  Her main requirements are to share
> documents in MS-Office formats with her teacher coworkers; also, the
> more mundane requirements are there (mail, web).
>
> As a teacher, she often resorts to various net resources to find
> teaching materials.  The thing that pisses her off the most is when she
> clicks a link in her browser, to download some file, and that file is
> not in a format that is supported out-of-the-box on her machine:
>
> - While looking for Thanksgiving music for a little play by students,
> she came across a huge pile of MIDI files.  When she clicked on one, the
> browser told her that no viewer was installed for that file format, and
> would she like to download the file instead --- which is useless.  Is
> this a distribution issue (should distros just install a sequencer and
> everything by default)?  Maybe; but the visible effect is that common
> things still don't work out of the box.
>
> - Video in various formats.  Enough said.
>
> Assorted, everyday annoyances:
>
> - Her coworkers of course use MS Office.  Whenever she creates a
> document in OpenOffice, she has to remember to check whether she's
> saving it in an MS format.  I know it's a configuration option so you
> don't have to set it every time --- then you get this scary dialog that
> some of the things she did may not be supported in those MS formats.
>
> - Dismal user interface for creating tables in documents.
>
> - http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-01.html#14
>
>
> In general, field research would be more beneficial in the long run.
> Real users --- random people who go to Brazilian Telecentros, office
> clerks in European cities --- don't know where to report their
> annoyances with free software.  They don't have time to find out about
> it as they just want to get things done.  You have to go to them, ask
> them, and watch them use the software.
>
>   Federico