GNOME usability hackfest (here be dragons)

[Posted October 28, 2008 by ris]

Mark Shuttleworth covers the GNOME usability hackfest. "The GNOME user experience hackfest in Boston was a great way to spend the worst week in Wall St history! Though there wasn't a lot of hacking, there was a LOT of discussion, and we covered a lot of ground. There were at least 7 Canonical folks there, so it was a bit of a mini-sprint and a nice opportunity to meet the team at the same time. We had great participation from a number of organisations and free spirits, there's a widespread desire to see GNOME stay on the forefront of usability."

So many wrong solutions

Posted Oct 29, 2008 13:54 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link] (1 responses)

Whenever I read about the radical FS redesigns by UI experts, I get nervous that it's just more gnome people trying to mess with how my home directory is organized... It really doesn't take anything radical to make files findable. Just make search work.

The trick about google is that it's just one box where you type stuff in and the results come back really fast. It's not something like on XP where you have to click through a bunch of options before you get the box. XP also has an option to "Speed this up" but ideally it would be fast by default.

Beagled is supposed to do this. I haven't tested it recently. What's wrong with it?

The idea of saving a list of files by order of access is good too. Not just 6 files like in Word but the last 500. And obviously it should be a separate program instead of just a menu under Word.

Those are the only good ideas UI people have had. The rest are a step in the wrong direction. By default if you download a document in Firefox it doesn't tell you where the file was saved.

Also why do gnome music programs save stuff under ~/Music instead of the ~/music directory that I was using? That makes stuff harder to find wouldn't you think?

So many wrong solutions

Posted Oct 29, 2008 18:17 UTC (Wed) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]

They're following the XDG spec, which also gives you a means to customize the directories: edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs or run xdg-user-dirs-update.

GNOME usability hackfest (here be dragons)

Posted Oct 29, 2008 23:50 UTC (Wed) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link] (1 responses)

These people have original ideas:

http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/

They call what they are developing a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) and the metaphor is a city map that can be zoomed in or out of rather than a Desktop and Filing Cabinets.

I'm not sure if I like it or not though it could grow on me. In any case they are thinking things through more deeply than simply removing useful options in the name of "usability".

GNOME usability hackfest (here be dragons)

Posted Oct 30, 2008 0:05 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I wonder if Nokia is working on something in this space with its maemo work.

Nokia is already has small form factor devices out in the wild running maemo..with touch screens. It would be interesting to hear a status report from Nokia on what they have been contributing to upstream lately..as a couterpoint to Shuttleworth.

-jef