I’m not a gnome developer, but recently had an maybe a decent idea, and didn’t really know how to best share it. This and other posts made me throw together a slide deck and borrow a friends blog (having no where else) to post it.

http://dvhart.com/content/blog/dvhart/linux/filemanagementideafromjohn_stultz

Jono: I don’t think there’s a technical way to solve the prioritization problem. A learnability flaw that prevents 80% of people from successfully using a feature is exactly as important as a crasher bug that prevents 80% of people from successfully using the same feature. But making those kind of judgements is really difficult for developers who understand their own software intimately.

If user tests were done more widely and the results publicized more widely, I think developers in general would get a better feel for how bad a particular usability problem is likely to be, which would help them prioritize.

appelflap: Canonical’s Design team is very new, but we’ll be talking about interaction design in general at UDS next month.

Glade is bearable at best. You can’t actually design with it, because you need to know what goes where in advance to build the proper table structure. Also it is just braindead that you have to take care about the spacing between widgets manually, every time. True not just for Glade, but GTK+ generally. Spacing belongs within themes!

Now the Flash-like tool I have in mind would offer a set of standard widgets that you could arrange on canvas by defining relations between anchor points. It would also allow to customise the widgets with vector and bitmap graphics. Or to build ones from scratch.

Said widgets could then be hooked up with the functions provided by the application engine. With scripting (ActionScript in Flash, Python would be cool) as glue and for controlling the GUI side.

It would also support animations. Even producing concept animations is pretty hard currently, using only FLOSS tools.

Ideally, the same tool could be used for GUIs, graphical work and website content. It could fit very nicely with the current plans of blurring the lines between desktop and web applications.

Over time it has become clear that there can be such a thing as too much commitment to backward compatibility and obsolete stuff should be removed. Since the Gnome developers have show that they can release stuff on a regular predictable schedule and still adapt to new capabilities, enhance usability, get cool new feature in, in a controlled and evolutionary way, the focus of major new releases should not be about the new stuff, they should be about cleaning house, getting the obsolete stuff out.

If the existing panel/applet/notification stuff is broken figure out how to enhance them/fix them. Maybe this requires writing replacements from scratch, maybe not. The KDE developers decided a re-write was necessary and have some exiting new possibilities because of it but at the same time you still have a panel with a menu, task area, and notification area. The trick is to look at the existing stuff and make it better, I’m not opposed to this single panel with optional sidebar idea, but I don’t really see a panel and a sidebar being different than having 2 panels.

Also one of the links indicated that ideas and/or statistics from the Windows 7 blog were considered, but what about other exiting ideas.

Windowmake for example.

Fire up an application and you get an icon in the task area. Drag that icon from the task area to the dock, you have a persistent launcher, no muss, no fuss, when you launch the application from the dock, you don’t get a new icon in the task area because the icon on the dock shows whether the application is running or not and gives you access to all of the management functions you would expect from the icon in the task area. The drawback being the implementation was never updated to handle multiple instances of an application, and they also don’t handle notification so you still need a seperate are to indicate a notification event happened and to display it.

Fluxbox:

Middle button mouse drag one application window title over another. now you have a single tabbed window with 2 seperate applications that can be minimized, maximized, moved to another desktop, etc…

OS/2:

Had the idea of rings. It’s been a while so my memory is pretty vague on what they did or didn’t provide, but for the purpose here think of this….

For any given task you may have multiple applications open at the same time to perform various functions within the framework of the overall task. So you add these applications to a ring, the ring gives you a single icon to launch all the related apps, a single icon in the task area where you can switch between the apps in the ring and close all the apps that are part of the ring and this could extend to a single notification identity as well so you identify the notification first with the ring, then the individual application within the ring.

Of course I am not a developer so I can only toss words out there in the hope that, just maybe, they will make it to the right people at the right time to be taken into consideration.

Later, Seeker

Re #18, part 2, what is really needed is a “Sketchup for GUIs”. I don’t think Glade can serve as such without the ability to do all rearranging and resizing via the mouse. Perhaps some AJAX-Y web interface that pretends it’s doing GTK layouts and lets the user drag things around?

I’d also be interested in an online place where designers (preferably experts) can showcase their ideas, and interested coders can join them to discuss and implement them. It seems a bit hard right now to get your ideas known if you don’t know the right people or work for the right company. It could be something like Google/Mozilla Labs. (Ubuntu Labs?) Let’s hope Launchpad will become such a place.

Also consider the Mozilla Labs Concept Series: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/concept-series/