Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

[I'll note that the direction the rest of this thread has gone is
indicative of why I'm very, very pessimistic about the long-term
health of GNOME right now. Take this as a mild attempt to get back on
track by talking about users and user experience instead of
capitalization of directories which users should never see anyway, and
which has previously been discussed repeatedly, endlessly and without
resolution.]

On 2/13/07, Christian F.K. Schaller <christian fluendo com> wrote:
> I guess from our point of view we would be interested in hearing what
> requirements/expectations people have for something like a media center
> solution to be included as a 'part of GNOME'.

I'd suggest that the requirement ought to be something like 'the
interaction with existing GNOME systems provides a good experience for
GNOME users and experienced GNOME developers.' i.e., don't "be GNOME";
be something that plays nicely with the existing GNOME Desktop.

That means something like:

* interoperates smoothly with the desktop user experience. Focus here
on good user experience, not which technologies are used. This means
you need to figure out first in what ways the desktop user experience
and the media center user experience interact, before you can figure
out whether or not something is GNOME-y. (The mentions of nautilus,
specific music players, etc., in this thread were probably a mistake-
the focus should have been on the user experience. My mistake in
starting that.)

* GNOME developer knowledge transfers over decently, with reasonable
reasons and replacements for technologies that aren't used. For
example, you're probably right that the GNOME Enterprise Desktop HIG
doesn't make sense for a GNOME Media Player; but perhaps it should be
a requirement that a GNOME Media Center have its own written,
documented HIG. Similarly, it probably makes sense to toss a lot of
API, but the release team might require that the new API surface be
documented. Note that this sort of presumes that we have a good
developer experience for the core desktop, which may not be true, and
so we should not construe this to be a high bar.

Luis