Location-aware GNOME Shell - weekly report 1

[Stéphane Maniaci <stephane maniaci gmail com>]

Web version with nothing fancier available at:
http://freesteph.info/post/2011/05/28/Location-aware-GNOME-Shell%
3A-Weekly-report-01

Hello,

Here's the first weekly report of my summer of code project: making the
Shell location-aware with a multi-timezone clock and some weather candy
later (didn't write to the shell list earlier).

== What happened this week ==
I started toying with the GNOME Shell UI, using my unexisting Javascript
skills to reproduce somehow this mockup[0]. Took me one Caltrain ride
(now my default time unit) to build a little dummy clock, as showed on
the, tada, screenshot[1].

Quickly realized that I really needed solid design before doing any UI,
so I tried to gather all the rockstars of #gnome-design together on
Thursday for a quick brainstorming. Nothing concrete came out of it, but
here's the point I remembered:
	- Displaying time + weather for all locations isn't a good idea (we
already consume a lot of space in the date/clock popup, and we want to
keep it a popup) ;
	- It's still pretty unsure where all those settings (locations CRUD,
weather config) will land in the control-center ;
	- XChat doesn't record any log, damn it.
Bottom line: we need to have another meeting and define more precisely
what we want to expose to the user.

I also downloaded geocode-glib, geoclue and libgweather in order to look
at the backend work, but didn't actually tried it out.

Not related to GSoC, I worked on a couple of branches for PiTiVi that I
want to get merged after the awesome (pre)release that came out this
week!

Oh, and I ran into busy Luis Villa in Caltrain last week, had a nice
half an hour chat with him! Talking about achievements!

== What's next ==
Definitely bother the design team again, while still not expecting some
actual UI sketches by the end of next week. The date/weather/timezone
thingy is a significant feature of 3.2 (pressure on me), so I expect a
lot of bikeshedding about how it should look/behave/configure.

I would also like a little Vala/Gtk program that asks/guess a location
and then retrieve the timezone using one of the forementionned
libraries.

== Scheduling ==
I'm on time. Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés ;)

== Problems & tips ==
A big issue that comes to me after this week is collaboration ; I
thought the design of the clock could happen on some mailing list
(because you can read them offline, take time to answer, etc), but I was
told in #gnome-design that IRC was the way to go, since there was no
gnome-design mailing list and that there would be too much noise on it
anyway. This is a bit sad, since IRC is very unpractical in terms of,
talking about it, timezones, offline record, etc. I'm not a big fan of
IRC meeting + wiki logging/recording, so if anybody (and you, design
rockstars) can think of a better way to think together, let me know.

That's a very long report, have a nice weekend!

Cheers,

− Stéphane.

[0]:
https://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design/blobs/master/mockups/clock/date-n-time.png
[1]: http://freesteph.info/public/GSoC/img/js-clock-first-try.png
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