Guadec 2010
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.
August 6th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Wow, those Gnome Shell screenshots look a million times better than it was when I played with it a couple of months ago… Nice work!
Not a massive fan of the green in that GTK theme and the massive window borders though…!
August 6th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
If there’s a green tint to the gtk theme, it certainly wasn’t intended. It’s either my color deficiency or you need gnome-color-manager and a Huey
As for the size of the buttons, it should scale down with titlebar font just fine. There is certainly room for iterating the default height of the titlebar, but I certainly want to avoid packing everything tightly, “saving space”. Whitespace is good!
August 6th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
big fan of spotlight effect and mono icon. I am totally blown away with the new design, though looks more busy than the last gnome-shell design, I hope things will be much easier to navigate around.
P/S: Who’s Lapo?
August 6th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Thanks for using the logo “Sponsored by GNOME Foundation”, but I am afraid we did not sponsored you. We only booked the hotel on your behalf (in fact, on behalf of Red Hat as well as Igalia).
August 6th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Although I enjoy mocking Jakub’s colour deficiency, I don’t see a green tint at all
August 6th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
German, that classifies as sponsorship in my book
August 6th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
The indicator for running applications reminds me of Docky which begs the question why not make it just like Docky (or use Docky)? Think about it, you can have your dock on any side, you can still drag/drop apps, you can customize the theme, you can autohide just the dock (that would be nice), and you can use Docky plugins for added features. These features would be great for the indicator/dock. Thoughts? BTW, I’m just an end user.
August 6th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Hey, after seeing this, this is the first time that I want to have the Shell in my desktop! Great work!
August 7th, 2010 at 1:25 am
Jakub, I’m sorry to have skipped this one too, but my knee wasn’t very happy about getting on a plane and being abused for several days. That’s bad since this one should have been a great guadec.
I’m happy you guys were productive instead of having huge quantities of ice cream as usual
Next time I’ll be there and I’ll bring my friends, the minotaurus, the yeti and the bigfoot with me
August 7th, 2010 at 1:26 am
Hylke, what’s wrong with colour deficiencies eh!?!
August 7th, 2010 at 9:02 am
Well nice to see GNOME shell get better improved but too bad it requires too much mouse movement to move to different categories.
August 7th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
The green I refer to is in the toolbar gradient in the screen-cast. I guess it’s more of a beige but it’s definitely slanted over to the greens. (from a screenshot I took, the value at the top of the gradient is RGB(140, 147, 131), so it’s only slightly green, but still very noticeable to my eyes).
August 9th, 2010 at 12:42 am
it’s green
October 10th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Too much clicks, too much mouse motions, lack of image staticnes. Needs redesign. Lots of work on screen surface utilisation.