Re: Introducing Photos

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
...
> That's not a reason at all, Yorba seems open to work on making Shotwell more
> GNOME 3 friendly... so those widgets can be shared anyway
>
>>
>> Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it
>> is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application.
>>
>> So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
>> existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
>> scratch?
>
>
> No.
>
> That makes as much sense as saying that Epiphany should have been written
> from scratch when the "Web" designs were proposed. We had a browser, a new
> design, and developers happy to follow those deisgns.

Sorry, that is totally irrelevant. The real story is that we had folks
show up, say they were excited about the design, have the chops to
pull it off, and want to work closely with us in the open to make it
real. How they went about coding it was entirely up to them. They
chose the most effective way for themselves. That happened to be
reusing code - as it often does.

> Writing software from scratch is almost always a bad idea:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Which is why it was pointed out that Photos has/can/will reuse a lot
of existing code (from Documents, eog, etc). This is particularly
important for allowing us to experiment with our design patterns.
Despite what you may have heard from some folks not involved in GNOME
design, we have been working very hard on this for quite some time
now. The patterns emerge as we explore solving new design problems.
This is why it is important to explore a variety of different
application types. And to have a high bandwidth, trusting, fluid, and
reactive relationship with the developers. See
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/ for more examples of these apps we
want to experiment with.

> Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it,
> and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most
> important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data
> store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only
> accepted data store in the desktop.

Sure, Shotwell is great. No denying that. I recommend you use it.

What we should not be doing, however, is discouraging new work by
highly motivated and talented community members like Debarshi just
because there is another app out there in the world. He's excited
about the designs, wants to work in the open, understands the GNOME
way, and is really excellent to work with. No one else has stepped up
to make Photos yet.

Regarding the data formats and such. In some cases it doesn't make a
bit of difference. But there are design implications. For example, we
need the core apps in the finding and reminding set to work very
closely together.

  * The Web view must be able to save photos in the Photos
storage/library
(https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Web#Tentative_Design).
  * Content selection must be able to access the Photos
storage/library
(https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/ContentSelection#Tentative_Design)

> If Yorba is open to follow the designs from the GNOME design team, I can't
> see any reason why we shouldn't go that way. IMHO is the quickest and more
> sustainable path to have a great photo browsing experience for GNOME 3.

I have been talking to the Yorba folks for a few years now. In fact,
Matthias and I were very early adopters of Shotwell and provided some
of the earliest patches and shipped it (in Fedora) before anyone else.
I think it is an open question whether the Shotwell team is even
interested in making Shotwell into Photos, making a core GNOME app,
doing design in the open, allowing our translation and bug teams to do
their thing. I would love to see that happen. However, I can certainly
see why it would be very challenging to try to change the direction,
design, and architecture of a stable and widely deployed app. I have
been involved in way too many of those kind of direction changes to
recommend it to anyone. It is much better in my opinion to reuse the
code where it makes sense and start off on a new direction without the
fetters of past expectations. And most importantly be free to fail.
With Photos we can be free to fail, faster.

That said, I love the work the Yorba team has been doing and I applaud
them for targeting the GNOME user experience. That's good for
everyone. I would love to work more closely with them. But, obviously,
that is really up to them. Regardless of what decisions they make
regarding Shotwell I hope to work more closely with this awesome team.
In the open :) But either way I'm happy to just have them making great
apps for GNOME.

Jon