UX Hackfest in London
Didn’t manage to write anything during the London UX hackfest as it felt more appropriate to steal some family time for that. Revitalizing, that’s what it was.
I haven’t had much time to focus on GNOME work lately. The people who made that work fun either moved on to other projects or suffered from the same lack of time. During the past week it was great to see many GNOMErs share the same design principles and being motivated to push things forward. My interest in gnome-shell shot up 1000% after talking to Jon & Jeremy.
The ever-cheerful thos walked me through the release process so I’ll be taking care of releasing gnome-icon-theme more often than we used to. 2.29.0 is out so people will finally start seeing the fruits of our long lasting labor.
The UI design sessions were awesome but we also got some visual design work done. I’ve talked to everyone about how necessary the widget-theme-color-aware symbolic icon style is and the reactions were overly positive. We’ve started on the essentials with Hylke and illustrated how these might fall in place for network manager for example:
We’ve also brainstormed some ideas for the window decoration and widget themes. Arstechnica has more details.
Big thanks to everyone making it happen. Check out the London set for more photos.
February 28th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
Copied the Mac OS X interface: Check
February 28th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
I knew someone will something about copying osx… great work guys
February 28th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Actually Windows Seven has that kind of icons too (and I like them)
March 1st, 2010 at 12:11 am
How dare you use the same style for your icons as my cell phone (and airport signs [1])!
1. http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/symbol-signs
(yes…1974, nine years before Lisa)
March 1st, 2010 at 12:48 am
To all those who shout “You’ve copied THEM!”
SO WHAT?
If an idea is good and you haven’t got anything better, you should adopt it. (In some cases you should hope not to be sued, but that’s another matter.)
Also, who copied whom? Among the big players, Apple is most likely to bring new interfaces to market because they have a smaller installed base to upset, they control the hardware, and they are simply less conservative than other businesses in that regard. But that’s only bringing the idea TO MARKET. The ideas may have been developed years earlier by someone yet unknown today.
To Jakub: That theme looks really slick! I actually prefer the 2.5d widgets of old, but that looks really nice.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:29 am
This looks great! I like how the menu and the window decoration look like one entity in the editor example. Would it be possible to reduce the height of either the menu or the decoration (or both) ? They appear to take up just a bit too much space, IMHO.
March 1st, 2010 at 3:56 am
Jimmac – out of curiosity, when you said you don’t work on gnome, what types of things do you work on at Novell now days?
March 1st, 2010 at 7:42 am
Yes, simplistic, trim and clean. Pretty mockup. I am looking forward to the implementation. Good work GNOME hackers
March 1st, 2010 at 9:20 am
Not meaning to get into hugeous arguments or anything but…the gradient in the toolbar reminds me of some of the off-yellow gradients I remember in some theme on an old version of Windows, maybe XP. (Or maybe it was something in Outlook. It’s been awhile.) And not in a good way. Then again, my only better-seeming idea is to do the OS X unification thing (not that there’s anything wrong with that), so what do I know? I’m sure there are other options that wouldn’t leave me cringing.
March 1st, 2010 at 9:21 am
I do like the outline icons, tho.
March 1st, 2010 at 1:45 pm
[...] Blogs der Entwickler findet man nun Screenshots und Mockups der angehenden Entwicklungsarbeit. Bei Jakub Steiner, M??ir?n Duffy oder auch auf ars technica finden sich viele spannende Informationen. Technik und [...]
March 1st, 2010 at 2:59 pm
Stop using macs goddammit!!!
Are you gnome devs or macfags? Thats just ridiculous…
You should be embarrassed of yourself supporting apple, a propretary company taking over all the douchbags.
No, it doesnt make it better installing Linux on Macbooks, you already bought it, thats enough for Apple.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:49 pm
@iFag
we are looking forward to your contributions made on your Loongson-2 MIPS Lemote Yeeloong Netbook.
March 1st, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Huh, GNOME’s going to have one advantage over all these disadvantages (Zeitgeist mostly): nice themes and icons and probably some toolbars-regarding stuff.
March 1st, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Good work! Now it’s time to go from mockups to real implementations.
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:15 am
I like it. Sure there is a bit of an OS X flair, but it’s also easy to see the GNOME heritage in it.
Hopefully the actual product can deliver on this mockup. Mockups have a way of being much slicker and prettier than the real thing.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:50 am
Happy to see you’re back at it. I really like your work. It definitely has it’s own unique style to it!
Just curious, will they be black, white or grey… or do the developers have a way to change contrast depending on the background colour?
March 2nd, 2010 at 3:32 pm
members of a gnu project using macs? Nice. RMS is proud of you.
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:38 pm
The fuck is up with all these people that show up and say “It copied OSX!” or “It copied Vista!” ?
As far as I’m concerned, this looks NOTHING like either one, and that’s a good thing.
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:55 pm
@James: Color is the important aspect of the style. It needs to follow the widget theme. I would favor a single color stencil being treated exactly as text, but there are sound arguments in introducing some color (battery-low, software-updates-critical…). In any case the colors need to be taken from the context of the widget. Technical solutions are yet to be found (gdk loader/pango font backend…).
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:58 pm
[...] succeeded in doing that, and most importantly, I think we managed to infect a few others with some excitement and even hysteria – which is [...]
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:56 pm
jimmac et al,
as always, incredibly nice work! i like a lot of things about gnome, but the one thing that makes me never ever want to change to something else is the unbelievably nice designs by you guys. thank you for all your efforts.