Re: getting www.gnome3.org

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 2:17 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> On 01/04/2011 09:11 PM, Stormy Peters wrote:
> > We do have gnome3.org and we worked on it at the last marketing
> > hackfest. At that time, it was really close to launching ...
> http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/gnome3.org/
> This design is a bit different from the one I did at the Marketing
> Hackfest in Spain, but it has basically the same stuff + some new
> content that Allan recently put together.
> No videos for now, since we don't have any ready, but a bunch of
> screenshots, some info, a faq and ways to try it. We can add more
> stuff, or refocus the page if needed later.
> Should be pretty ready to launch.
> - Andreas

Thanks for all your work on this, Andreas. The site is looking really
nice.

Ditto!  I do have a couple of suggesiton.  The background seems to be of the same palette as the letters and it makes it slightly harder to see.  I'm wondering if a better contrasting background color (slightly darker perhaps?) might make the letters pop out a little better.  This is just a personal observation and of course YMMV.  It would be easier to read then.  But then I've found that my eyesight has gotten somewhat worse this past couple of months!  Damn these post 40 years. :)
 

 * The experience these previews provide is going to be sub-standard
compared with the final 3.0 release, and we need to indicate that to
users (in big big letters). Instead of 'Try it now', something like
'Test the alpha' or 'Technology previews' could work. And we need a big
'Alpha Version' or 'Preview Versions' sticker on the page [1], plus some
text [2] which explains the quality issue.

Just a slight digression on this, as your "preview release" reminded me of something I wanted to mention regarding our own final release:

So, my observations regarding KDE4 on slashdot and other forums are that users are nuts.  KDE 4.0 was released as a "preview release" and people were bitching constantly about regressions despite whatever was said about it.  Basically, they've decided that if you put 4.0 in front of it it means that it is stable and is ready to use and has all the bells and whistles like the last release.  "3.0 == stable"  Now for us we aren't going to have everything at 3.0, and I'm hoping GNOME users are a lot better at accepting this than KDE users were.  I have no idea where you get that kind of idea in software.  Nobody believes that a dot oh of anything is going to be completely stable.  We need to be on our guard there as I don't believe we will be feature complete by release.

 
Now as for previews itself, I think we will need to do that so that it is constantly mentioned.  I would like to put something in slashdot and other forums that it is available and it is a preview release.  With the final release in mind, we will need to seed the expectation that GNOME 3.0 will iteratively be feature complete a year after release or something and will continue in a different direction.

Best,

Allan

[1] http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/gnome3.org/getit.html

[2] What about: 'GNOME 3 is under active development and will not be
completed until March 2010. If you are interested in what it will look
like, want to help with testing, or just cannot wait to give it a go,
you can use one of the following methods to try a preview version.
Please be aware that these previews will not provide as good an
experience as the completed version of GNOME 3, however.'?

If you add that, we need to at least teach people how to interact with developers on feedback.  I can imagine a fresh bunch of people joining the mailing list and we'll have to go through the whole thing again.  Pointing towards bugzilla, the faq, and design decisions also should be required.

sri