Re: A call to action

[colin z robertson <c z robertson ndirect co uk>]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 01:00:49PM -0700, Gerry Chu wrote:
> It seems like our great little mailing list and the hitsquad have been for
> quite a long time swept into the backwaters of GNOME development.
> 
> Here's the beginning of a file dialog thread on gtk-devel-list:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2000-August/msg00241.html
> 
> Here's an announcement of a new file dialog with screenshots:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2000-August/msg00251.html
> 
> And here's the sourceforge page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtkfilesel/
> 
> No mention at all of us.  No mention of whether the developers cared about
> ui issues.  And this isn't the first time we have been left behind.

Consider how our file dialog discussion progressed: An alternative
dialog was suggested, we generated vast amounts of verbiage about how
the dialogs should work, we even came up with some concrete ideas
about it. Since then I've done a little work on trying to make a
prototype, but then university started again and it ground to a halt.

However, in all of that I don't recall at any point anyone saying "How
do we communicate this to the GTK+ developers?". Without that I don't
think it would be fair to expect the GTK+ team to implement our ideas.
They probably don't even know we exist, and that's our fault, not
theirs.

So, regarding the file dialogs in particular, has anyone told Luke
Holden and/or Michael Torrie about our discussion? If not I'd better
do so...


> I think some core GNOME developer (eazel?) needs to organize the mailing
> list, the hitsquad, and developers to commit to a written down process on
> how new ui designs for GNOME / GTK programs and widgets are going to be
> finalized into _release_ form.

What sort of written down process do you have in mind? And does it
require that degree of formality? (I've no idea how the decision
making structure within GNOME works.)

It shouldn't be too hard to make for each discussion a document
containing a description of our suggestions and then to present that
document to the appropriate people. However, we may require more
discussion with the developers than that would provide...


> Once in a while, there's an misguided article about GNOME has no ui-team, no
> ui-standards page, etc, etc.  And then I think: wait--what's this person
> talking about?  We have the hitsquad, we have this mailing list, he have...

Actually we are still missing a very important part of any UI project:
A set of UI guidelines. Arlo Rose said that he was working on this,
but I'm not sure what priority it is.

colin

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