Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 08:08 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 04:35 -0600, Andrew Savory wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> <snip>
> > 
> > Focussing in on one area that I can talk about: Qt is perceived by
>  some to be stronger from a business perspective due to the 'more complete'
>  offering: extensive documentation and an SDK.
> 
> Shaun McCance and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I'm
> not trying to steal his thunder (and I hope he replies on list) but he
> has spent a significant amount of time in the last couple of weeks and
> has put together some thoughts around planning new Developer Docs on
> lgo[1].

Thanks Paul.  I'm not sure what else I can add.  As a developer myself,
if I can't make headway with a platform in an evening, I usually look
for alternatives.  And there are almost always alternatives.

There are many ways we can lower the barrier to entry for working with
our platform.  Improving and promoting easy developer tools is a huge
win.  Hats off to everybody working on that.  Another way to level the
learning curve is through better developer documentation.  We can do
better.  A lot better.

So back to the vision thing, what if we applied the old "simple, usable,
beautiful" thing to our platform?  The effects of this are huge.  Along
with better development tools and better documentation, this also means
finding APIs that are difficult or cumbersome to use and fixing them.
It means removing every roadblock we possibly can.

(And don't worry about stealing my thunder.  I don't care who makes it
happen.  I just care that it gets done.)

--
Shaun