Re: Maybe help ease the pain of 2.20 release notes?

["Thilo Pfennig" <thilopfennig foresightlinux org>]

On 3/15/07, Joachim <joachim gnome googlemail com> wrote:

The other problem with the release notes is that we do them backwards.
We should be thinking about the 2.20 release notes NOW, not in 6 months. We should be planning what the focus of the next release is, instead of just listing what's come over the wall at the end of the cycle.

Well I think that this is absolutely impossible. For instance I had added Jokosher 0.9 to Foresights release notes and just heard on the release day that this will not be released. I think  you can try this in a company like Apple or Microsoft - but even there thery must accept that they do not meet the goals.

I think what we CAN do is to have some people that try to be uptodate of some project statuses. I had tried this on this page:

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/GnomeProjectStatuses

The thing is that this need more intense communication. I also must thing of this talk http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=6765603919277760697

I just watched today where Mike Pinkerton explained that one of the things they had to learn was that if people own a task/project that is a way that no one will contribute because OSS people respect ownership.

I also do not think that Fedoras release notes are really THAT good. I think they are very elaborated but technical. I think they are a good base for journalists, but not for end users.

I would agree on some points: I think each release should have a "message" and some highlights and UI think we should start to plan that. i think we need to encourage developers to work on some weaknesses and try to be good on some things. This can mean that many applications do not have any news.

To talk straight about GNOMEs weaknesses I just say what I think that is NOW:

1) Evolution - From my view you just cant use it. i hav read that some where able to activate spam protection but I was not. Also I have not heard any exiting news from it for a long time. This is one of our core applications! Here we loose users to Thunderbird, which is much less integrated. If there was any excitement the problem is that it just did not get through  to the users (like me)
2) Epiphany - Here the problem is not so much the application but the GNOME support. This is core application number 2 and it really is great - we just dont communicate it enough. Here we loose against Forefox and Konqueror.
3) Printing - Here we get better. Good! Continue the great work but invest more time
4) Handling of scanners in digital cameras. This still sucks. We now have gnome-scan, which is

 very important from my view - we just had no interface for scanning.
5) Instant Messaging. We still have no good standard IM application as part of core. But instant messaging becomes more and more important like browsing and mailing.  We also suck on IRC interface.
6) Image handling - GIMP is ok, but simple image manipulation is still a hard task - like red eye removing. Some applications like f-spot take upt the task, but are not part of core and actually are not very gnomeish from my point of view (not intuitive)
7) Playing sounds and videos - this is still not easy enough. Also the default music player totem is called "Video player" which is very confusing. This whole field needs to be rethought - do we want itunes style music players or where do we ant to go - what interfaces are must usable? Also audio and video need to be managed.

This is what i see as our  main weaknesses - I am sure many have a very different view. But I think its important to communicate also about subjective views.  I would love to see other lists of what you think should become better.

Thilo

-- 
Thilo Pfennig
http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/~vinci/