Re: [Usability]LinuxWorld Presentation comments

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi John / Luis / Calum etc.

On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 10:09, John Palmieri wrote
> I was in the Birds of a Feather meeting dealing with Linux in K-12
> education.  One of the IT directors at a school which is considering
> moving over to Linux didn't get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the
> Gnome presentation.  Reportedly the speaker had to kill some processes
> and some things didn't work during the presentation.

	That's quite right. The most irritating thing that didn't work was that
'gok' (it seems) decided (prolly in collusion with at-spi) to screw with
the window manager, focus etc. such that it was impossible to move
windows around (such as those obscured by the default gnome-mag
magnifier etc. (sigh) ) that was a pain.

>  The IT person felt nervous that she might be making a Linux switch
> proposal that would end up giving them an unstable platform.

	The other thing is - that if I only demo things that are stable, and
tested, and work well, the talk on Gnome 2.2 would be decidedly thin ;-)

> instead mentioned that the presentation was
> about the 2.2 beta and that 2.0 is currently the stable branch
> Others in the know did so as well and she seemed to be satisfied.

	Good 'oh - that's quite right.

> Again I was not at the Gnome 2.2 presentation and am not trying to
> criticize for the sheer joy of it.  In fact I thank the presenter for
> giving up his time to prepare the talk.  I just wanted to share the
> perspective of this profesional who is trying hard to push Linux in
> her school but who is not an "insider" to Linux or Gnome development.

	I'll try and stress more carefully that what I'm showing is not stable.
The talk was segmented into 2.2, 2.0 and 1.4 sections, but I guess I
could say more about what that means - I believe I tried to; it's often
hard to demo bleeding edge things in a flawless fashion ;-)

On Tue, 2003-01-28 at 12:34, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-01-28 at 00:52, Luis Villa wrote:
> > Anyway, I've cc'd Michael; I'm sure he'll appreciate the the feedback.

	Absolutely, thanks for it John - most useful.

> Just so it's not all doom and gloom, Peter Korn from Sun was demo-ing
> the accessibiility stuff at an accessibility conference last week too
> and it got a very positive reaction... GOK in particular is shaping up
> pretty well now and has some features that just aren't available even in
> commercial on-screen keyboards.  Knowing how busy Michael usually is, I
> also suspect Peter might have had time to more thoroughly research the
> bits that wouldn't crash for his demo :)

	Heh ;-) it was more manually having to kill mis-behaving apps from the
console that caused the problem I think; [ gstreamer-player also needed
this treatment, and wouldn't scale video correctly: what can you do when
demoing software that doesn't work, but try and fix it so the bits that
do are work are repeatable ;-]. ( possibly I should have a desktop
'cleanup' shortcut that does it all invisibly I guess ).

	I'm quite pleased with the general robustness, and repeatability of the
a11y work now; although it still needs more general polish, and I'm
scared to turn it on for the complete desktop on a machine that I have
to try and give people some idea of how Gnome performs on ;-)

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot