Re: Certification for GNOME apps

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Hi ~

I'm actually feeling the opposite of Andrew here, but funny enough...
for almost the same reasons.

I like the idea of having certification levels for GNOME apps in terms
of library usage, but not in terms of user experience.  By using similar
libraries you are automatically dragged into a somewhat similar user
experience.  Our libraries are designed for a certain kind of
experience, and this means they are not necessarily suitable for other
user experiences.  If GNOME had the all singing all dancing libraries
that allowed you to do anything, we'd never get any of it done and you'd
be able to build whatever experience you wanted off of that.

Really the user experience shouldn't be tied down to any certification.
Otherwise someone would have to spit out the ideal user experience for a
computer desktop and then we all would work towards that.  But in
reality the user experience is changing just as rapidly as the libraries
are.

An example of where certifying the user experience would scare me is web
browser bookmarks.  I've been researching some ideas [1] to almost
completely remove bookmarks (as they are now) from the user experience
of GNOME web browsing.  If the "web browsing experience" were
standardized, then there would be a long road ahead of either
standardizing this new experience or getting a low certification level
because of changing the status quo.

Obviously in this example the libraries for bookmarks might change too,
and thus a library certification would run into the same problem as
experience certification.  So read on for my last point.

Sadly, in my experience ISVs don't particularly care about the "user
experience" anyway, so if we termed this certification in that language
they'd probably just be turned off by it.  Maybe that's not always the
case, but usually they just want to know what libraries to use and what
versions are most supported, etc.  Since as I wrote before, our user
experience is heavily influencing our libraries, any ISV that targets
our libraries will most likely get close to our experience. [2]

I'd suggest certifying the library usage of GNOME for ISVs and
explaining along with this how other highly certified apps provide the
expected user experience with these libraries.

Thoughts?
~ Bryan

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/epiphany-list/2005-June/msg00061.html
[2] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1787803,00.asp - the original
had a screenshot of the old GTK+ file chooser with the quote "The
feature that has me most excited in Version 7.0, which was released this
month, is its finally sane file open dialog."

On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 20:54 +0100, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 20:42 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Mer, 2005-07-13 at 16:27, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > > Level 2 - the app is actually written with GTK+.
> > 
> > Why does this matter ? Surely it is about degrees of integration and HIG
> > compliance.
> 
> I agree. I was similarly surprised by (on the wiki) the requirement to
> use .glade files as a possibility for one level; surely this
> certification should be about the user experience, not coding practises.
> 
> This leads to a few modifications to the ideas suggested on the wiki;
> for example, "Uses gnome-vfs" would be "Is able to open and save files
> to/from any http:, ftp:, smb:, nfs: (others?) url." Which amounts to a
> similar thing, but is based on how much a user would care.
> 
> Basing the certification on library usage could lead to a situation
> where the certification only matters to someone thinking of hacking on
> the project!