Archive for October 22nd, 2006

Posted on October 22, 2006 - by jono

Making applications look schaweeeeet

When we started the Jokosher project, we wanted it to kick arse and take names when it came to usability, but also attractiveness. This is why my-friend-and-yours J5 is displayed in the New Project dialog, and why we have spent a lot of time on making Jokosher look attractive, yet neat.

Dialog design is essential here. God gave you eyes and Carl Worth gave you Cairo for a reason, so lets set them on fire and make our applications look the bomb. As Laszlo blogged about, I added some header images to the effects dialog boxes when I was hacking on the code; this was to make the dialogs look consistent (by using the orange Jokosher theme) and attractive. One of the problems was with kind of approach was translating the text I put in the images – the text was part of a bitmap. This is a big problem now Jokosher is feeling the i18n love. To fix this, Laszlo recently replaced the images with a Cairo equivalent. As such, now we have good looking dialog boxes that translate well.

Traditionally, form and function have divided people into two approximate camps, one accused of being orange-sunglasses-wearing-hippy-web-two-point-zero-idolising-feckless-morons and the other described as over-technical-geeky-binary-lovers-with-no-mates. Why do we even need to make a choice? Why can’t we feel the love of powerful software…with rounded edges and shiny dialog boxes?

As our desktop moves into a new era, one driven by windows that wobble, software that gets ever more advanced and users that demand attractiveness and ability, we have so much opportunity. Hey, its not as if we don’t have an incredible platform to do this. Using Cairo as one such example, we have such an awesome ability to use this important component in our desktop to re-shape how we look at software. When I was hacking on the effects dialogs, sure, I could have made my life easier if I just used a plain old push-button for each effect, but I really wanted the dialog to have some life and have some character. There are of course usability concerns here too – in a future version of Jokosher I would like to replace the effects listed in the dialog box with images that look like a physical effects unit such as a stomp box. Cairo gives us the ability to break away from the Gtk mold and explore better ways of representing concepts on the desktop, and better ways to deliver attractive interfaces. Feel the power!

Of course, with power also comes responsibility, and like many of you folks, I never want to see our desktop turn into the invent-your-own-interface-and-toolkit bonanza that is going on in the Windows world. Here we want consistency of toolkit and HIG, but scope to develop new constructs and ideas where it makes sense. When I look at the GNOME desktop, I always feel like there is an opportunity for someone to wave a paintbrush over it to spruce it up. Lets see some of that action going on.

Posted on October 22, 2006 - by jono

RaccoonShow Maintainer: Apply Within

Quite a while back I wrote a little program called RaccoonShow. It takes a PDF file with a bunch of slides from a presentation, an audio file and a text files with some times, and generates a Flash animation of the presentation with the slides and audio synced. I wrote it largely for my own use, and released some of my talks using it.

Well, its languishing right now as I am working on other things (with Jokosher as my primary hacking project), so I want to hand the code over to a new maintainer. It is written in Python and uses swftools, and is currently a command line app. I always planned on writing a simple GUI for it too as a seperate application. It is licensed under the GPL.

So, if you fancy hacking on it, post a comment on this entry. You can get the latest release here. I am specifically looking to transfer the project to a new maintainer.

I think it would be a really great project for someone to work on, and can potentially help thousands of presenters around the world. So, if you want to work on a useful, inspiring project, grab the code, hack it and let me know what you are doing. I would preferably like to choose a new maintainer, but you can obviously grab the code and do what you like with it within the remit of the GPL.