GNOME Summit 2010
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!
November 15th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Very nice! one question, the window buttons seem to be very big compared with today’s gnome themes, why?
November 15th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Simply Beautifull
November 15th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Wow, really astonishing. The new visual look is greatly welcomed. Looking forward to see this come to live on my machine next year! Keep up the great work.
–atla
November 15th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Very good looking.
How does the widget with “on/off” work? When I move the rectangle over “on” it’s set to off and viceversa? That seems weird to me.
November 15th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Jimmac, I think I mentioned that on Flickr once already, when you �Save As� »Cairo PNG« it renders the output with hinting.
Example: http://i.imgur.com/NSfF1.png
November 15th, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Would it be possible to have the spin buttons side by side instead of on top of each other?
The spin buttons have been the smallest buttons since Windows 3. They are at least 1/4 of a regular button.
November 15th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
It looks good, but also rather bulky – someone else commented on the large title bars, and I had the same reaction to the tool bars.
On current Gnome, title bar looks to be about 25 pixels, and the toolbar about 35. In your mockups, they look to be about almost twice that, which I’d hate to see on my netbook screen… I’d be losing about 18% of the usable screen space.
Can you try to make things a bit more compact?
November 15th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
@anonim: While the buttons seem to be larger than your average theme, it’s very likely you’ll only see the close button for GNOME3. Having the buttons a reasonable size, along with enlarging the area you can drag the window by was one of the goals as we are targetting all the netbook devices as well as your nice machine with precise positioning devices.
@matt: We are betting on the selection color prelight to give enough visual feeback on the state that it won’t pose a problem. We might need to revisit that design if it poses a problem.
@Louise: I think it makes sense to keep the arrows spatially indicate their affect on the widget. It may be desirable to make a drag as slide on the widget change the value. That way low precision pointers can be used more efficiently.
@Simon: 600px tall displays are definitely a target. There needs to be a balance between having a compact titlebar/toolbar and making a decent click target. I should also mention that there are no pixmaps used in the theme and it scales based on the font size.
November 16th, 2010 at 1:04 am
Are the anti-aliased rounded window corners real?
November 16th, 2010 at 1:31 am
Does the iOS style slide on/off switch that appears in many gnome-shell mockups exist in gtk yet?
November 16th, 2010 at 1:36 am
cool. you guys need to target mobile also
November 16th, 2010 at 1:37 am
Those are really gorgeous designs, and I must say some really tasteful use of negative space. With so many UIs trying to cram as much functionality into the smallest possible space, it is really good to see an attempt to use the space between window widgets in an attractive way rather than single-mindedly pursuing multifunctionality. I have a couple of questions: 1) how does your side-dock thing in the Activities view handle icon over-flow?; 2) Assuming I am correct that the increased widget target size means you are also aiming for touch computing usability, is there any thought within Gnome on a post-WIMP interface for tablets, i.e. everything is full screen all the time. I would really love a Gnome tablet!
November 16th, 2010 at 2:29 am
@immac – “we are targetting all the netbook devices as well as your nice machine with precise positioning devices.”
If I read that right, you’re suggesting that “netbook” implies imprecise positioning, presumably a touch screen. And I have to dispute that – while there are a few netbooks with touch screens, most are just small laptops – they have the usual trackpad and do not need (nor can afford) the larger click targets that a touch-screen requires.
November 16th, 2010 at 3:19 am
Really like the unified Window title/Menu bar area. My only peeve: why the dividing line between the toolbar and tab area?
November 16th, 2010 at 4:01 am
Wow, the new (css?) theme looks stunning!
Just to clarify- is it a mockup or actual work in progress?
Thanks.
November 16th, 2010 at 5:55 am
Well, it finally happened. I’m actually excited about Gnome 3 now. Crossing my fingers, but it’s starting to look really nice
November 16th, 2010 at 8:57 am
This looks really slick! I like it.
However, I do have a problem with the waste of vertical space. That is typically in low supply, and people value it (see Chrome’s success, they really understand how to avoid all that wasted space).
In your mockup, look at gedit, and imagine I’m a casual user that opens a file. The result is rather sad: we have a title that says “Text editor” (_totally_ wasted space), a menu bar (that is not all that commonly used), toolbar, a _single_ tab, and only then my content, the stuff that I’m really interested in.
I think we’d do much better if we can save on the vertical space. Folks dig it, and for a good reason.
November 16th, 2010 at 11:41 am
@vinhoverde: Not yet.
@John Stowers: Only in the shell for now.
@anonim: Actually small mobile devices are way too different and need a different approach.
@BrianF: The dash will scale down items to fit. No gimmicks here. Also there is size thresholding in place so the small sized icons are sharp.
@Simon: you might get a more precise input device on the touch screen versions. Have you ever used a typical netbook touchpads? Those things are terrible.
@Dylan: The inset toolbars make it possible to introduce the navigational/mode switching buttons like this.
@Jon: These are indeed mockups. The current state of the theme looks like this.
@dimi: While the height of the titlebar+menubar is marginally taller, the real focus is on presenting manageable amount of visual information at one time, rather than making the ton of widgets more compact. There is a balance to strike with these variables – limited amount of screen estate, crappy input devices and human cognitive ability. I personally want more whitespace in GNOME3, we’ve had too much of compactness(TM) in the past.
November 16th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
@Jakub – I *do* have a netbook, a cheap Acer one, which is why I’m making this point. And the touchpad is no worse than on full-size laptops, and considerably better than many I’ve used. It’s certainly not an imprecise input device.
And I have to agree with Dimi – you most certainly have *not* had too much compactness in the past – quite the opposite. Applications have two things – content (photos, web pages, spreadsheets, etc), and other stuff. Guess which bit is important to me as a user? Hint – it ain’t the menu bars, the title bars, the toolbars, and everything else that exists only for the purpose of working with content.
November 17th, 2010 at 4:07 am
@Jakub — it is rather unfortunate that you dismissed this very important concern. This is not only a matter of a few pixels up/down, this has to do with the general layout that gets in the way of content. Users care about content, not all these baroque decorations.
If you care about presenting manageable amounts of information (which is a great goal BTW), just do that — get rid of a lot of this extra cruft, I’m not suggesting that you simply cram it together tighter.
With all the work we’re putting into design, GNOME, etc we still continue to make unfortunate mistakes and not listen to what people want:
– we tried to ram *for years* the silly spacial mode down people’s throats, with every complaint dismissed as coming from a “vocal minority”; we’ve reverted that in the end, but it took *years* with only us to blame
– we still have this silly tabbed interface by default for gedit which makes no sense for a casual user; I’ve complained to the authors, I got summarily dismissed that this is a programmer’s editor! So WTF is this the default in Gnome then? Say I want to open a simple README file, look at all the crap that sits on top of the content I’m interested in! Is this “simple”? “manageable”?
– now, once again, we’re changing fundamental things in Shell (like the Alt-TAB browsing) without rhyme nor reason for the worse, without much in the way of user testing. It’s a pity, there are some nice ideas in the Shell, but I had give up on it, as it made me a lot slower.
Bottom line, I think it’s a mistake to dismiss these concerns. I understand that as a designer you have hundreds of opinions to listen to, and something has to give. But to me this is a case of putting the cart before the horses.
People *highly* value their vertical space. It’s not a theory, the Chrome and Safari people got it, and people loved it. Why not listen to that? Why not follow their lead? What we have here is mid-1990′s layout, with some nice touches. It is nice, but is the same old thing.
If we are to break with tradition, let’s do it for the better, and incorporate more of what we’ve learned in the past 15 years. And that includes the value of vertical space
))
November 18th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
This looks great. The only thing I would change is the window control box size (minimize, maximize, close buttons), it is too large.