Re: GNOME 3.2 ideas and plans

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Matthias Clasen wrote: 
> With GNOME 3.0 going into code freeze any day now, it is high time
> that we start looking beyond 3.0 and start collecting ideas and making
> plans for what comes next. To that end, I have collected a list of
> things that have fallen off the 3.0 train at one point or another, as
> well as some other things that might be nice to put on the roadmap.
> Some of these have designs and/or working implementations, others or
> just ideas.
> 
> I'd like to encourage everybody to chime in with their own ideas and
> plans for GNOME 3.2.

Thanks for starting this thread, Matthias. I totally agree with the
priorities you've set out.

I'd also like to see us concentrate on the design quality of our core
applications. There are already designs in the repository [1] for some
of these, including EoG, the calculator and Empathy. There are others
that still need some design love.

Nautilus was a success story this last cycle. The UI roadmap [2] process
that we used there seemed to work really well: perhaps designers and
developers could sit down at the beginning of the cycle and draw up UI
roadmaps for other applications?

Software aside, we really need that new version of the HIG that we've
been talking about (Calum has been taking this forward recently)!
Getting that sorted will help us to improve the quality of our
applications and should help us to define how we want to tackle some of
the cross-desktop UI problems we have. I'm particularly keen for us to
come up with a plan for full-screen controls.

Finally, I'd like to be thinking about our contributor experience. This
might be something that has to wait until the following cycle, but it
could be possible to start the process earlier. I'm particularly keen to
examine the issue in a holistic fashion: we need to trace the journey of
a new contributor through from landing on gnome.org to committing a
patch or providing documentation, translation, design, etc. What are the
weak points and trouble spots? What are the things that are most likely
to turn someone away? It might be that there are small things that we
could do that would make a big difference.

Allan

[1] http://gitorious.org/gnome-design
[2] http://live.gnome.org/Nautilus/UIRoadmap
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