Re: Suggestion: Remove the Window Title Bar

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On vie, 2011-10-07 at 14:21 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-10-07 at 10:31 +0200, Florian Müllner wrote:
> 
> [about http://live.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/Menus#Local_menu ]
> > It's certainly true that an original idea doesn't have to come from an
> > "official" GNOME designer to be considered, but in this particular case
> > I'm fairly sure that it is not the direction the design is moving to.
> 
> In any case, that wiki page (and the other whiteboards where anyone puts
> in proposals) needs maintenance; otherwise it is in danger of becoming a
> wall of graffiti ideas.

Sad, but true.


> Tooting my own horn, the following is a good example of how explain a
> design rationale, take ideas, and discuss them:
> http://tinyurl.com/62hba45

I'm not sure that the goal of cleaning up the design wiki should be to
provide a rationale - I know that there is a demand for more
"accountability", but the resources are spare. In fact, counting
regulars on #gnome-design who'd self-identify as designers, the GNOME
design team is probably smaller than the design team at Canonical (which
itself is tiny when compared to Microsoft or Apple) - designing a
desktop is a huge task (much bigger than "just" shell design), so I'd
rather see them spend their time on improving GNOME than spending half
their time on justifying past decisions.

That certainly does not mean that design decisions should never be
questioned or that discussion should not happen - I'd even go so far to
say that questioning decisions and discussing is very much how the
design team works. This process is neither obvious nor approachable by
people who cannot spend a lot of time on #gnome-design or happen to live
in an "unfortunate" timezone - without a doubt this is a huge problem.

Unfortunately no one has come up with a workable fix so far - if we want
to create a great OS which is developed and designed in the open (but
still with a distinctive and coherent identity rather than "everyone's
pony" *kough, kough*), anything that significantly slows down the design
team is just not feasible.


> Maybe someone can clean up the gnome-shell whiteboards in a similar way?

That would be nice, but honestly I think that gnome-shell is the least
interesting part - time is probably better spend on extracting "proven"
design patterns from current application designs (contacts, docs,
boxes ...) for application developers.

(That said, the shell design pages have been cleaned up occasionally in
the past, and I'm sure it'll happen again ;-)


Florian