Re: GNOME 3.2 ideas and plans

[Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org>]

Allan Day wrote:

> 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.

Thanks Alan too.


> 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?

It would be excellent; "if you don't blog about it, it didn't happen",
and it has been so true with the gnome-design repository, we need to
publicize the designs and this will get new contributors on board, I
am really fond of the GNOME Voice Recorder design by Hylke, he blogged
about it[1], and two weeks later someone had started implementing it
and posted on the gnome-multimedia.

 [1] http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/blog/gnome-voice-recorder/
 [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/2010-August/msg00002.html

But then it was not followed actively by existing contributors, and I
fear this stopped the effort. And that brings your last paragraph,
about the contributor experience,

> 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.

Three are many things; GNOME Love was nice, but somehow went down with
time, and the disappearance of the gnome-love emblems in Bugzilla
searches. I heard upstream bugzilla has been fixed to make that
feature possible in an extension, something to investigate.


> 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.

A big +1 on this, the HIG was a comprehensive document for all
developers, the rewrite as patterns will be very nice, and will
allow to have a definite answer on many things, how to present
a list of elements, with plus and minus signs, in which situation
should the GtkSwitch widget be used, etc.

As Richard wrote,

  > Some control center panels have gray labels without the colon,
  > some have black labels with the colon. Some are right aligned,
  > some are left aligned.

And this leaves developers without a known good reference.


During the 3.0 cycle the marketing and design teams were fantastic,
but they are only now appearing in our schedule and processes
(defining the "featured apps", for example)

Just like we integrated older teams (e.g. the string freezes for the
translators, or consulting the documentation team about new modules),
there are certainly things to do here; you wrote it above, here it
is again:

> perhaps designers and developers could sit down at the beginning of
> the cycle and draw up UI roadmaps for other applications?

Not just because we are in the mood for 3.0, but for future versions
too, having that part written down in a schedule makes it important.

This is definitely something I find important, I'd like to take time
to hear ideas from all teams, and shake it out.


A direction is that Fedora has "features", Ubuntu has "blueprints",
and we could do as well, thinking things up for the whole GNOME, not
delimited by modules.

A good example is our Sharing story, in the words of Matthias:

  > - Sharing: We have rygel, and gnome-user-share, and vino but no
  > finished design for how this is going to appear in a control-center
  > panel

So there's Bastien from gnome-user-share, Zeeshan from Rygel, Juan
from Grilo... some initial design by Hylke (iirc), we should find a
way to assemble persons and ideas, and get that created for 3.2.




        Frederic