Re: Proposed module: conduit

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 13:24 +0200, Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 30.07.2008, 22:56 +1200 schrieb John Stowers:
> > On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 12:44 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > I failed to figure out how to upload (or sync) photos
> > > from a local folder to flickr. I did manage to drag rectangles for
> > > flickr and a folder to the canvas.
> > 
> > Did you read the help documentation?
> 
> With that question you described best, why Conduit is not ready for
> GNOME inclusion yet: No GNOME application, really no single one should
> require studying a manual for doing absolutely basic operations.

Well I think *study* is excessive, but I acknowledge your point. Lets
compare conduit with a word processor/presentation app/music player/note
taker. If you install a new flavour of one of those applications, even
if you have not used it before, its pretty clear what to do. Usability
in that case is equivalent to familiarity. You have already learnt how
to interact with applications of that family before, its familiar enough
to dive right in.

What is the similar family of apps to conduit. What are people
expecting? Given a new type of tool, with which they are unfamiliar, is
it not OK to ask that the user spend a few minutes learning about it?

I dont ask the user read the whole documentation. The section entitled
"Understanding the Conduit Interface" is quite brief, and explains the
whole link-stuff-together idea.

> 
> 
> Despite that Conduit looks really promising, but it still needs a lot of
> UI love, and UI love is a quite central topic in GNOME - IMHO.
> 
> * For me it was hard to figure out, that some of the icons in the left
> can act as synchronization source __and__ as sink.
> * I only figured out by accident, that I can drop targets in the box
> drawn by some synchronization source.

Good point. Perhaps we should have a temporary indicator shown while
hovering a drag and drop

> * I've dropped some "Network" sink and it is connected to the source by
> some red line. What does this color mean? I cannot figure out how to
> configure or even just remove that seemingly useless sink.

Context menus do everythin on the canvas. There is no configuration for
network, which is why the config option will be grey in the context
menu.

Yes the red line is confusing, thats actually a bug....

> * Guess I'd already help if the Conduit canvas would follow established
> practice and provide graphical hints when some place within the canvas
> would accept dropping of something. For instance you could place a
> translucent but linked version of the dragged item within source boxes
> which can accept the item:
> 
> +---------------------------------------------------------+
> |  +------------+                      +---------------+  |
> |  | Home       |----------------------| Backup Folder |  |
> |  | Ready      |       :              | Ready         |  |
> |  +------------+       :              +---------------+  |
> |                       :                                 |
> |                       :              . - - - - - - - .  |
> |                       '- - - - - - - : Something New :  |
> |                                      : Preview       :  |
> |                                      ' - - - - - - - '  |
> +---------------------------------------------------------+
> +---------------------------------------------------------+
> |  +------------+                                         '
> |  | Photos     '
> 

Good idea. I think I will implement this.

> * Also it would help if some artist would take care about the canvas and
> apply sane padding and line widths. It'd also help to apply theme colors
> instead of randomly chosen colors. My desktop theme uses decent
> gradients for UI elements. There are no gradients at all in the Conduit
> canvas.

Any volunteers? My art skills are limited.

Thanks for your reply Mathias, these are the kind of responses that I
intended, and wanted, the module discussion to bring out, these kinds of
actually can make a big difference*

John

* Aside: I think the module discussions should be *much* earlier. To
actually give application authors time to address concerns raised.


> 
> 
> Ciao
> Mathias