Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Thanks for restarting this discussion Dave. This is my first post to the
foundation list. Hi all! :)

<snip> 
> Proposed community mantra: Beautiful computing freedom
</snip>

<snip> 
> The thing about a vision is that it easily makes it easier for you to
> choose the right path at the fork in the road.
</snip>

Vision is useful from the point of view of interface design. I'd love to
see a vision for this articulated somewhere. On the desktop, GNOME
should be aiming to produce interfaces which are beautiful, elegant and
simple; they should enable people to get their stuff done without
getting in the way; they should be designed for the majority of users as
well as the technically minded.

Part of our vision for the desktop should be to produce interfaces (and
user experiences) which compete with our rivals'.

A vision for our application interfaces has been largely absent from the
3.0 effort. We should be using strategic milestones like these to
radically improve the quality of our core applications, and we should be
using them to articulate our aspirations for our desktop experience. How
cool would it be to give Nautilus, Epiphany or Evolution a facelift for
3.0, for example?

Another point about the quality of our interfaces - we need to give
designers a greater role in the development process if we are going to
be competitive. Fortunately, GNOME has an amazing, talented design
community; but we need to embrace and empower those designers. They're
the ones who can provide the vision and who will enable GNOME to be
competitive.

Oh, hey, I just discovered the Evolution express work that is being done
[1]! This is cool! This is something that people need to know about!
This is something that needs to be a part of the 3.0 story! Let's make
sure that the design of this is magnificent.

Allan

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Evolution/Art
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