Quoted in full and CC'ed to our mailing list. On 15 October 2010 17:28, Matthew Jadud <mja...@allegheny.edu> wrote: > Hello all, > > You are receiving this because you indicated that you had a FOSS > project that might benefit from a student team contributing usability > testing and design. > > This week, the students completed their sprint through the Fedora > Project website, and we will be communicating the results of their > testing back to the FP websites team shortly. The students learned a > great deal in their sprint, and are ready to move on to the next phase > of the course. > > There are only three student teams. They selected projects, began > contacting their communities, and in more than one case found an > unresponsive community. This is the nature of real-world FOSS > participation, and we knew this was possible from the start -- so > we're not worried/complaining. It is *possible* that the students are > not contacting the right people, but they started by engaging with one > of you and/or by using the communication mechanisms that your project > uses most. (For example, a team looking to work with VLC found there > is heavy reliance on IRC, and therefore the students are doing their > best to do their communication in IRC. This is working well so far, > and they're excited.) > > The other two teams will continue attempting to find projects with > responsive communities. Our ask remains simple: give them some > direction so that they are working on high-value projects *for you*, > and by-and-large they're self-directed and self-sufficient. > > If you hear from any of them in the next day or two, it's because > they're now looking for a new project that wants their contributions. > > Many thanks to all of you, and keep hacking on the good stuff that you do. > > Cheers, > Matt > Thanks for the update. Here is a small update on our side in MyPaint, and some possible directions for your students. We have just released MyPaint 0.9.0 beta1, which means we are in string freeze and will release MyPaint 0.9.0 final in some weeks. And after that, we will be focusing again on new features and improvements.
Some interesting tasks (for us, and hopefully for you) 1. Brush selection workflow Today this centers around the "brush selector" dialog, which can bee seen here: http://mypaint.intilinux.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/GUIfull1.png I suspect that several things about this dialog is not very intuitive, and not as good as it could be. 2. Brush editing workflow This is an action that is performed more seldom, but has more complexity associated with it. Current solution is the "brush editor", of which an older version is shown here: http://mypaint.intilinux.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/snapshot3b.png The current solution exposes all the internal complexity directly to the user, with little to no help offered to understand what is going on. This is, in my opinion, one of the least usable aspects of MyPaint. 3. Usability on tablet PCs Tablet PCs are an important class of devices which have so far been neglected by us. Going forward we want to fix that, and some good interaction design would be a great start! More an idea: 4. A user interface for a "MyPaint Mobile" application This is much more uncertain if we are able to implement, due to the size of the task and that it is a bit of a sidetrack from our primary focus. But I might be able to convince someone to sponsor me to work 50-150 hours on something like that, so if you are very interested it is a possibility. The target form-factor would be the ones that require a fundamentally different user interface (and targeting slightly different usecases) than the original MyPaint: Smartphones, MIDs, small slates. Small-ish mobile devices with touch/stylus as main input device. If any of these tasks seem interesting, please let us know and we will provide more information. -- Regards Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com PS: The CC'ed mailinglist and IRC are our main communication tools. _______________________________________________ Mypaint-discuss mailing list Mypaint-discuss@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/mypaint-discuss
