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Archive for the ‘GNOME’ Category

New Planet Editor

March 03, 2011

I’ve taken the post of editor of GNOME Planet with Vincent in 2009. Since then, the approval process for new feeds received a couple of important improvements. First, we made the process more transparent by publicly processing all requests in GNOME’s Bugzilla. Secondly, we added clarity to the process by writing down a set of guidelines detailing how requests are processed.

But it’s been some time that I haven’t been dedicating enough time to process new requests. It’s time to pass the ball to someone who will be able to process the requests more promptly while still ensuring the high quality of the aggregated content. So, I hereby announce that Alberto Ruiz is now replacing me as co-editor of Planet GNOME. He has already done a great job in processing existing requests and I am confident that he’ll continue to do so. Welcome Alberto!

Horizontal Space

February 16, 2011

Bastien’s latest post about the new GNOME screen panel—which looks generally nice by the way—reminded me of something that bugs me a bit on certain user interfaces with abundance of horizontal space.

In the new screen panel case, the brightness slider widget fills most of the window width. My first impression was “Wow, I’ll have to drag the pointer quite a long distance to adjust brightness”. But this kind of misuse of horizontal space is not so rare in other contexts. You can also see it on MeeGo’s status panel with too wide buttons on top. Or in some Maemo 5 apps, with weird menu buttons filling the whole screen width.

This kind of issue usually happens when the UI has to conform with some broader constraints from the design. For example, the screen panel runs inside GNOME’s System Settings which requires all settings panels to have the same dimensions. MeeGo’s status panel could definitely be less wide but the design seems to require all panels to fill the screen width. All that for good consistency reasons. But you might end up giving more space then the UI actually needs—in which case you probably want to ensure nothing looks odd.

Bad use of horizontal space can be avoided by spending a bit more time getting your UI layout right for the available horizontal space. Adding inconsistency to better cover special cases might be acceptable—if the resulting UI doesn’t have a major negative impact on the user experience.

The examples I gave here are not the end of the world or anything. But they definitely add some unwanted awkwardness to the UI. And, you know, little details matter.

The Board 0.1.1

February 01, 2011

The Board 0.1.1

Here we go again. About a month ago, I made the first-ever release of The Board. Now it’s time to roll a new release with some pretty nice features and bug fixes. So, what’s new in The Board 0.1.1?

It also has a couple of important bug fixes such as 637703 and 637484. Just like 0.1.0, this is not a release for end-users. The Board is currently unstable, buggy, and often loses data. Early testers are more than welcome though—to provide general feedback and report bugs. Distro packages for 3 popular distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE) are coming soon—I will announce them in my blog, don’t worry. That should help early testers get started easily.

Versioning. I decided to use the classic odd-unstable/even-stable style of versioning. This is a common practice in GNOME and should be natural for most contributors in the community. In terms of milestones, this means that you’ll see a bunch of 0.1.x development releases from now on and 0.2.0 will be the first release for end-users. I honestly have no final answer as to when 0.2.0 is going to happen yet.

What’s next. I will be rolling a new development release (0.1.2) in the next few weeks—depends on the amount of spare I end up having. I’ll focus on two things: toolbars and element stacking. I’ll do a second design iteration on the toolbars with focus on scalability. In practice, this means fixing bugs like 636637 and 636634. Element stacking is the final major feature for multiple elements which I ended up moving to 0.1.2. You’ll be able to create stacks of elements in the page. I’m quite excited about this one!

Selection in The Board

January 26, 2011

Selected Elements

Since I started dogfooding The Board on a daily basis, it became clear to me that not having a simple way to arrange multiple elements in the page is quite annoying. If you wanted to arrange multiple elements in a specific area of the page, you’d end up having to move each element separately, one by one. Argh! This is why I decided to focus on an initial set of features targeting this specific issue for the upcoming release.

You can now select, move, align, distribute, and remove multiple elements in a page. Click on the image above to see a video demonstrating the new features. Selection can done in three ways: the usual dragging from background to start selecting a region of the page, Ctrl+clicking on elements, or using Ctrl+A to select all elements in the page.

Once more than one element is selected, a context toolbar slides in presenting all available operations for the selection. I’m following the same obviousness, clarity, and consistency principles I’ve discussed before. The available operations for any app state are always visible and easily accessible. No need to dig around to find out what to do.

As usual, feedback on the design decisions are more than welcome. So, what’s next? I’ll be fixing a few critical bugs and then roll a new release. I’ve been pestering distro guys to create packages for The Board. I’ll hopefully be announcing the next release with links to distro packages.