Not so long after Florian cleaned up the overview-relayout branch to accommodate the visual tweaks initiated by Allan, here we are again to move the target a bit (engineers love me).

Initially shell exposed two views. A tiled view for an overview of your workspaces (something we can’t expect majority will want to manage). A linear view that presents application windows for easier switching (and dropping documents on). Exposing the mode switch to the user wasn’t good design and even if we presented the tiled view only when rearranging windows or selections of windows across workspaces, it felt like too much of an odd case.

Well luckily Jon came up with what I believe is an elegant solution that works around the limitations of the linear view. In addition it also helps to gradually introduce the workspace concept to curious users who would have otherwise not bothered.

Here’s a very crude motion mockup of how the sidebar behaves:

• The workspace sidebar is hidden by default, ignored by the majority of users. It would slide out on cursor proximity and or when a drag is initiated on a window or a launcher.
• This interface relies on animation – it would be hard to grasp if things just popped from one frame to another. Things need to scale and slide to aid the spatial relation between workspaces and windows.
• The IOS like rectangle navigation we had in the linear view only gave you an idea of the number of workspaces and the position. The thumbnails make it much easier to identify a workspace to switch to or drop a window/launcher to.
• The interface would work just as good horizontally, but it’s more common to scroll documents vertically and we already use the bottom of the screen for messages

Now while I think the workspace thumbnailing addresses the most useful part of the tiled view, we still rely on the user to do workspace “management”. So the next step is to make the Shell do the heavy lifting. Stay tuned.

First and foremost I want to thank J5 for organizing this year’s event. Lacking any sort of organizational talent (have hard time organizing my own day), I appreciate the effort one has to put into making an event like the Summit happen. In addition it has been great to see the sponsor support for an important event like this, Collabora in particular (for the best kind of sponsorship .

It’s always a bit amazing to walk the premises of MIT with a slightly unfair feeling of belonging there. The new media lab building is like time travelling to the future. Including the fear of robots attacking me in the hallways.

My private agenda has been quite successfully met. I have found a partner in crime for the execution of the visual theme for GNOME3 in Matthias Clasen, who has fiercely hacked at the most important bits of the widget theme to play well with the window decorations. And while it may sound like a bit of a setback to continue on “dead end street” of theme engines, we are actually going to see the work of Carlos Garnacho land and the final theme being executed solely CSS style, by designers rather than engineers. While Matthias has exposed some of the things I’d like to draw in gtkrc through the clearlooks engine, there is still things that aren’t yet achievable (such as drawing gradients for all the widget states rather than one). Also worth noting is that we’re standing on the shoulders of Benjamin Berg, Hylke Bons, Lapo Calamandrei and Thomas Wood here.

Forgive the lack of hinting on the font

You may have heard we’ve gotten the amazing Dave Crossland aboard and work on getting Cantarell ready to be used as a default screen font on GNOME3. It has been my pet screen font for quite a while despite some rough edges as it’s a typeface with the right pedigree (passionate designer understanding the collaborative free software culture rather than a commissioned work). I’m happy to have it be part of the GNOME3 identity.

System Settings work has also moved forward despite (or maybe due to) the lack of my contributions.

In the Gnome Shell land, Florian’s relayout branch is getting ready to land. Florian was quicker implementing the newest iterations than I was able to produce comps for them. It was fun to see an actual demo of something I planned to introduce.

The summit has successfully injected more enthusiasm for GNOME3. I hope the end result will show the amount of love that went into making it happen. We’re getting there!

• Some photos from the Summit

See the whole set

Took me a while to find some time to write up about this year’s GUADEC. I’ve done a bit of a pause and it’s been a bit different to what I recall. The first thing that stroke me is that I didn’t recognize a lot of the young crowd. Being one of the oldest in the conference is both great and a little depressing. But I choose to focus on the part that GNOME is a healthy project attracting young developers.

Design is in

I also sensed an increased interest in design. No more were we approached to provide some bling in the form of icons (hi Christian). We had a nice session with people from Epiphany project about page flow and tab organisation, “appification” of web pages and general role of Epiphany in GNOME. I made way too many promises, sadly.

The enthusiasm for involving design people gives me some hope the UX advocates project has a chance.

Shell Yes

Jon made a fairly convincing point that we lack a polished user experience, but also need to make a convincing experience for application developers. He also suggested a marketplace should be part of GNOME, and not let to fragment on the distro side, forming a viable application ecosystem. Learning from Android, Moblin/Meego or WebOS has been a thought that resonated with the audience.

Jon allowed me to demo some transitions from the new reskin we worked on recently. We may have freaked some shell developers a bit, but it really hasn’t been a dramatic redesign it may have appeared so at first. The greatest part was that Florian later showed us about 60% of the changes proposed implemented. Love when that happens. We had a good discussion about how to address some behaviour, mainly window to workspace and launcher related drag and drop. Expect some visualisations of that.

Iterating the indicator for running applications. Final design on the right.

The same “spotlight” effect can be used for active system indicators.

You can follow all the design work as it happens in the gnome-shell-design module.

Cluttersmith

As always Pippin blew us away with some nifty demos of a visual design / prototyping tool built on top of clutter, Cluttersmith. Sadly it will be some time before we can taste the sweetness of rapid prototyping.

WM theme

I even got stuff done! Based on the work we did during the UX hackfest in London, and the pixmap based prototype Hylke has worked on, I’ve actually found time to start implementing the window manager theme. It’s currently not using any pixmaps at all, but there are some obstacles still ahead of us.

A much larger and important piece of the theming puzzle will be the widget theme (these need to work together).

There is a ton I have missed that I regret, mainly the design pattern focused new HIG BOF, but I have enjoyed this year’s Guadec a lot. So that was another Guadec a mythical Lapo Calamandrei didn’t attend. Maybe the next one. Thanks to all and the GNOME Foundation in particular.

Today was my first day at Red Hat. I spent most of it behind the steering wheel though.

This isn’t the most radical job switch you can think of. Big corporation with strong focus on open source with red and grey dominating its visual identity. Most of the 3rd party rpms I download work just as well on Fedora 13 as they do on openSUSE 11.2 So why the switch?

The amount of upstream work I’ve been able to do has been in steady decline in the past few years and I am hoping to reverse that trend. As a graphics designer I’m hoping to give GNOME 3 the attention it deserves, so I’m planning to get back to hitting some afterburners maintaining the gnome-icon-theme and focus on visual design of gnome-shell.

Part of that is tying the loose ends of the symbolic style. Write some basic use guidelines and provide full naming spec coverage for gnome-icon-theme-symbolic.

Do the same for widget and WM themes what we did for icons — create a basic set of usable defaults that distributions can build on top of rather than reinvent the wheel. Asset reuse and building on top of other people’s work is what differs us from the proprietary world. Branding doesn’t have to throw that benefit away. Why run the whole marathon when you can just sprint the last mile?

I obviously do plan to join the Fedora design team to help shape the Fedora brand. But I am most interested in working on upstream GNOME projects, creating the building bricks both Fedora and other Linux distributions can benefit from.

I am a strong believer in competition. Free software has matured. We need projects/apps that have specific vision rather than try to do everything for everybody. It is necessary there are competing free software projects as there is no one right way to solve a particular problem. But there is a ton that can be shared. I personally like to focus on those bits that we can share and build cross-company, cross-distribution communities. I hope the geekos don’t feel like this is a farewell, even if I may now be seen wearing an eccentric hat.

Today is my last day working for Novell. They say we shouldn’t focus on the past, but I do have to look back a little.

Novell has allowed me to take part in some really awesome projects. Going back to Ximian, I was lucky to be part of the Linux desktop revolution (this year will totally be the year!). I helped to shape the aesthetics of Novell Linux Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE and most importantly SUSE Studio.

I won’t forget Novell for making many opensource projects such as Evolution, Mono, F-Spot, Banshee, Tango and many others possible.

Some really good stuff is about to happen with Studio, but for obvious reasons can’t spoil it by telling you. Soon SUSE Meego will bring what I think is the best netbook ui design to a wider audience and the last openSUSE I was involved in, 11.2, will come out in just a few days.

I will also miss the upcoming hackweek, which is something I recommend to any company. People will do awesome things for you if you let them do their little pet project. I would never be brave enough to dive into type design if it wasn’t for hackweek.

As for what I’m up to, stay tuned for an upcoming entry

As of today is the day you can enjoy a fresh new release of openSUSE, the mothership of projects like Banshee, Evolution, F-Spot or Kiwi.

While 11.2 defaults to KDE, we have a solid GNOME release as well. GNOME ships on both the DVD and a separate LiveCD. Now you can actually put the ISO on a USB stick or an SD card and boot from that.

Styling of 11.2 may be a bit different to what you’d expect from SUSE and is a bit of a return to the golden Ximian days. Darker, less saturated shades of the background let your content get all the attention. It’s still green though

Gilouche has been the openSUSE theme for a while now and 11.2 introduces a new default, Sonar. Sonar is a metatheme consisting of window manager decorations and a widget theme. Unfortunately a key element didn’t make it in time — the icon theme. By default you still get the familiar Gilouche folders. You can, however, install the Sonar icon theme from Factory. It’s also the first time we’re using the openSUSE font, 5th Leg, for window titles. 5th Leg is the result of openSUSE’s Hackweek and have to express my gratitude to Novell for this event yet again.

    

SUSE Moblin

Sonar isn’t the only new theme addition though. Building on top of some great design coming from the openedHand/Intel team working on Moblin I’ve experimented with a simple glyph style (although slightly less minimalistic) and an easier workflow for creating such an icon theme. While the font approach ended up as a failure, the SUSE Edition of Moblin is now shipping a theme based on the foundation of the hackweek experiment.

Unfortunately the theme isn’t independent of the widget and WM theme color yet (if any hacker is interested in figuring out how to best recolor the SVG glyphs based on gtk colors, please step forward . The good news is that you can try the complete package on the desktop even if it was designed for a small netbook screen (with a clumsy touchpad). It works quite well if you have enough screen estate.

You can grab the latest and greatest moblin-cursor-theme, moblin-icon-theme and moblin-gtk-engine from my personal repo.

Go ahead, try openSUSE 11.2. We love GNOME too!

One of the best features of SUSE Studio is the ability to boot your appliance remotely on our servers without downloading it first. It’s cool to test and improve the appliance as you can actually bring the changes done interactively back to the appliance project.

Of course there are times when everybody wants to do that at the very same time, so we have a queue system to accommodate the situation with limited resources. As this is not exactly a pleasant thing for the user we thought to make it less annoying by providing a nice graphic to look at while waiting. The first idea was to have a couple of Disters (our robot mascot) standing a line.

But it looks a bit depressing, doesn’t it? Instead of cheering up the user waiting, the image of a long line actually strengthens the negativity of the situation. So back to the drawing board. How about focusing on the fact that we have our hands full rather than the user waiting.

As the sketch worked well and got approved, I went ahead with tracing it. The beginnings are always hard as the graphic doesn’t seem to work until the very last moment. But in the end we’ve gotten ourselves a brand new failwhale:

Last week we launched our SUSE Studio service announcing its 1.0 status. It’s been an honor to be part of the team behind it. I mean what other project uses javascript, flash, java, ruby, perl, mysql and git and at the same time qemu, kvm, libext2fs or fontforge, inkscape and blender?

You’ve had the chance to hear about some of the technology behind the project. I’ll add some artwork related bits into the mix here.

Dister

Building software appliances isn’t exactly a hip topic general web folk would rave about, but judging from the response I think we managed to get quite a broad attention. Our robotic mascot, Dister, helped maintain the fresh startup-like identity.

Initially he was created as a vector illustration, but went 3D in the end. The 3D part was a bit masochistic. While the process has been very painful and I’ve struggled with every small thing while creating the character, at the same time it was great fun. The result isn’t quite where I wish it would be, so I hope I can build up on the skills I’ve learned here soon rather than forgetting everything as I usually do. People who do character rigging deserve my utter respect. Even simple things turn out to be quite complex in the end. I also wish Inkscape performed like Blender does. It’s absolutely mindblowing what you can build up using modifier stacks in Blender and move it interactively. Inkscape just lets you taste the power of linked offsets, clones and filters but really under-performs in real life scenarios.

See the whole set on flickr.

Website Aesthetic

As any good product, we went through numerous iterations of the site. Sadly I didn’t manage to migrate the db back well enough to give you a taste of how things evolved over time, so here’s just a few things I managed to resurrect.

Comic Strip

One thing I’m sad we had to bin was our comic strip, err documentation. The idea was to create a nice walkthrough of the interface and the tech behind Studio in the form of a short comic strip.

Unfortunately I couldn’t pull it off in a reasonable time and even if I did it would probably retain that “oh, they’re copying Google” aftertaste.

Origami CD Covers

Another feature that didn’t make it into 1.0 and will hopefully become available in future is a mean to print out an origami cover and a CD label to the custom appliance you’ve built using the custom artwork you’ve specified.

I’ve only created a proof of concept using my favorite duo — Inkscape & ruby, only this time throwing rmagick in the mix to get the automatic text color based on the background lightness.

I hope you have enjoyed a look behind the evolution of SUSE Studio visuals as much as I’ve had fun creating it. Don’t be shy and let me know at the comments below.

Failure IS an option for hackweek . While things looked fairly optimistic on the icon theme/font front, the actual results don’t look so good.

While the chopping script is working fairly well, it’s hardly elegant and really suffers from insanely slow startup time of Inkscape. The “crop” is done thanks to Inkscape’s verbs and requires Inkscape to be called once per icon. Even worse, to clean it up and remove some cruft for the Fontforge import, it needs to be called once again.

Ted mentioned a GSoC project to provide a better interface for external scripting (using dbus), but I haven’t had time to look into it yet. By the time I’ll look at this again, it’s going to be merged in, surely .

Fontforge’ interface couldn’t be in a bigger contrast in terms of speed. Importing SVGs as glyphs and generating a truetype font out of the template is faster than you can release the return key. Sadly FontForge doesn’t expect the font height to be 24pt and all the circles don’t end up as such after the import. I haven’t been able to figure out how to either scale the SVGs up to 1000px in Inkscape or transform after the import in FontForge.

So this has been a rather kind failure. One that doesn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time.

CSS theme engine

I had an old mockup for a CSS theme that now felt too bubble gummy. After dealing with the hyper-realistic renderings of gnome-icon-theme high res, I enjoy the minimalism of Moblin.

Sadly time has run out as I’ve had some outstanding tasks I needed to handle. Hopefully I can get back to this. The engine just manages to avoid me.

Linuxtag is happening in Berlin later this month and SUSE Studio is going to be there.

As a byproduct of revamping the website I’ve created a set of posters for the show. Come see us and feel free to decorate your office

While it is noteworthy how much the PDF export improved in Inkscape, Evince chokes a bit on the embedded bitmaps and doesn’t handle masks. Have to suggest Acrobat reader this time :/