Re: Working Draft

["Gervais Mulongoy" <gervais mulongoy gmail com>]

Thanks, I'll find a way to use this.

On 3/5/07, Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

Gervais Mulongoy wrote:
> I have attached a link to a working draft.
>
> http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen/ReleaseNotes/Draft
>
> Let me know what you think, ok?

Am I the only one who doesn't get excited by the prospect of being able
to see my disk usage as a ring chart?

I think that a lot of the stuff we've got in there at the moment is
interesting to a very small portion of our constituency - Baobab, Bug
buddy, ...

In fact, in a lot of the changes, we talk about *what* we have changed,
and not why.

"EOG now automatically rotates images based on EXIF information..." -
why not express this in a more simple, user friendly way.

"If you rotate your photos in the camera, they stay that way when you
view them with the image viewer".

The same goes for every point on there - "GNOME dictionary now
highlights phonetic references"... what's a phonetic reference? What
does this change for me when I am using the dictionary?

"Epiphany uses more Tangoified icons" -> "the GNOME web browser looks
better than ever"

"Evince has a history feature" -> "Track changes in your documents with
the GNOME document viewer"
"new presentation mode" -> "Giving presentations has never been easy"

Tomboy - "Make your post-it notes even more useful - keep important
notes around, organise items into lists, search your notes more easily
than ever before"

Evolution -> I can customise the fetching of my IMAP headers? Great!
What does that mean? If you can't explain why it's cool for the user,
drop it.

GDM: I can customize "Options/F10 menu" - woohoo! Can someone explain
what the ConsoleKit is? How about "Your first meeting with your computer
just got better" - showing the smarter face browser?

GNOME Games - this is good stuff. Screenshots of multi-player gnibbles,
iagno, four-in-a-row should be abundant, people might install this just
to get GnomeSudoku and glChess looks purdy.

GNOME Media - I'm not sure what these changes mean. Is this gstreamer?
Or something else?

gpm controls frequency scaling -> turn this into a user win - "Make your
laptop battery last even longer by turning on economy mode, and tuning
down your processor" (don't mention that the hard drive is what uses
most of the energy though ;)

Seahorse - interesting technology - I feel like there's a good chance to
talk about personal information security and how we're much better than
Windows here. Examples like encrypting files and email would be nice.

Vino - minor feature from a user point of view - drop it.

Accessibility - make this a headline feature, but explain the user benefit.

GNOME Speech - do we actually include a text to speech engine? I'm not
sure I understand what this does.

Magnifier - just talk about the screen magnifier and why it's important.
We don't need to underline the XComposite change, really. "Zoom into
those difficult-to-read parts of your desktop with the GNOME magnifier,
improved in GNOME 2.18"

Pango - no need to mention it by name. We can just talk about how we're
improving vertical text layout.



Sorry if I've been taking a hatchet to this list - but the question
should always be "what can I do better than before, or what can I do now
that I couldn't before?" We're underlining the what and the how, and not
the why. That is, we say what we've changed, and how, but not what that
actually gives to the user.


I see this splitting broadly into 3 categories:

1. Pretty stuff
- Epiphany icons
- Metacity theming
- GDM theming and face browser

2. Easier function
- Images auto-rotated
- Added support for presentations and document history
- Sticky notes with embedded lists, pinned notes and a search bar
- Save your laptop battery with gpm's control over your processor

3. Personal security
- Create and store secure personal encryption keys
- Store sensitive documents encrypted
- Manage all your personal passwords securely
- Send email with an unfakeable signature
- Send email securely

4. Fun
- Network support for gnibbles, iagno, gnect
- glChess
- Gnome Sudoku

5. Universal access
- Support more text-to-speech motors than ever before
- Vertical text layout
- Improved screen magnifier
- Thai support in dictionary

6. Developer
- New! Integrated developer help engine
- New! Creating GNOME application interfaces never easier
- Improved bug reporting ensures that GNOME just keeps getting better

In general, I would drop application names anywhere we can. Concentrate
on these 6 sub-categories (or fewer, if you can manage), and always
concentrate on what a user will see, and why it's better.

Phew - after all that I hope I haven't sepressed everyone :) This is a
good first draft, and allows you to see more easily where things
logically go together.

Cheers,
Dave.


--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org