On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Vincent Untz
<vuntz gnome org> wrote:
- Changing the way we access documents (via a journal, like GNOME
Zeitgeist [3]): having to deal with a filesystem in their daily work
is not what makes users happy -- on the contrary, they generally just
want to access their documents and not to browse their hard disk.
Providing new solutions to this problem (using timelines, tags,
bookmarks, etc.) is something that has been of interest in our
community for a long time, but we never completely jumped in. We
simply should.
Thanks for mentioning the project. We're in the middle of a major rewrite right now, and it's great to know that people have noticed the project and liked it.
We're currently looking for mockups and new ideas related to the user interface. If anyone is interested in helping out, we'd love to see you in the #zeitgeist channel on
irc.gnome.org. :)
There's one obvious question related to those potential changes: what
will happen to the old way of doing things? For example, will we still
make the GNOME Panel available if, for some reason, people are not
immediately happy with GNOME Shell? There's no obvious answer to this,
and this will have to be discussed. Some of us believe that it would be
a good thing to keep providing the old elements for a limited time, to
ease the migration. That being said, doing that would obviously take
some development resources and slow down work on what should be the
future. Not an easy choice, of course. However, it's worth noting that
distributors and other community members using GNOME to build enterprise
products will most certainly help maintain the GNOME 2.x shell for quite
some time, and the project will support that to the greatest reasonable
extent.
The best way to decide something like that is with real testing on existing GNOME users. Lets not decide that ourselves and assume that the end users agree!
(Perhaps Dave Richards can help us with testing. His user base isn't representative of most GNOME users, but at least its a place to start.)
