Re: Prototyping the next generation panel?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 18:30 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On 28 Oct 2008, at 16:00, Vincent Untz wrote:
> >
> > Don't know if you read Owen's post, which talks about how this could  
> > be
> > implemented:
> > http://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/
> >
> > I guess we'll have stuff in a svn module as soon as there's proper  
> > code
> > to show :-)
> 
> Cart, meet horse...
> 
> How about we start as we hopefully mean to go on, by usability testing  
> mockups of some alternative shell/panel designs first, to figure out  
> if we're heading off in roughly the right direction before we even  
> think about committing anything to code?  (If those initial  
> investigations have already been done, can we see the results  
> somewhere?)

Replying to this a bit late.

I think a lot of the technical stuff we need to do is really pretty
orthogonal to the usability aspects... if we can make the bold
assumption that we want a framework that involves:

 Easy to program and experiment with
 3D effects and animation
 Application windows mixed in with desktop components
 
Then the technical stuff we are working on makes sense.  I think there
is a lot within the above constraints that is usable, and a lot
unusable.

I do think there is sufficient detail in what's on the wiki for someone
to do paper mockup tests (or whatever) of some of the designs; and it
would be great if someone wanted to take on that task. We'd certainly
be happy to provide more details where they are missing. I don't think
we should be blocking on someone doing this, however.

And as great as low-tech prototypes are, they do only go so far.

We just have to be conscious of the "but we've already coded it" trap.
I'm really hoping that the technologies we are going with are going to
keep the barrier to changes and even radical changes small; that may
or may not be true in practice. We'll see.

- Owen