I just found out about your project 2 days ago & it stroke me like a lightning, finally some common sense in open source development! People with a desire to create and look for innovative/evolutive solutions to the crescent problems in computing experiences & interfacing. If this project goes ahead half as well as I hope, then we will have a revolution in the linux desktop environment.
I am a recently graduate student in Graphic & Communication Design, with my most recent projects dealing with interface design & management, it pains me to see so much effort in creating applications wasted in repetitive & similar programs wich cover the same functions over & over, media players for example, most programmers follow other programs UI's adding the functionality they think is missing or should have, creating most times complex, inintuitive & ugly looking apps, without having much tought on how the users are concerned, but in a more egostistical way, in what they want to do.
If open source is to strive & evolve as strongly as it should, there must be a stanpoint to this & as it is a breeding room for programming experiences, open source should also be it for UI's, I think appeal stands a good way to do it, not only in remaking KDE, but in having a breeding room to work with application developers on how to create intersting functional ways to create applications.
I have had several projects created for open source projects, albeit none implemented so far, or only in a very limited way. the first was a media player interface, based on iTunes, to have a common point with the currently developed one, in wich the point was making the media management & browsing as appealing & easier as possible, with several devices to help the user, such as hover actions on albuns, browsing albums by cover, smart editing features, auto-grouping, & a few other ideas. Unfortunately the author only wanted icons :P . Sometimes i go a bit too far.
The secon was for an open source media center for Mac called iTheatre, wich was also my design thesis for My final year. A very complex subject, as far as interfacing is concerned, but very passionate to work on. Again i developed a couple of new interesting concept for browing, displaying informatin, managing content, searchng. etc. The final unfinished result was very interseting albeit never finished, where i worked on proposed functionality & associated solutins. My biggest achievement was a browsing system with a kind of lens system where the information was scrolled below it & would be expanded in the lens, making for a more confortable experience where the expanded & selected was in a fixed space without confusing the user & he could quickly view other content.
My third project & smaller was recreating functionality & interface for a windows widget program called avedesk. Still to be developed the author at least was very interested, & i had a strong focus on micro managing & hierarchyzing all functions, as well as making easier ways to set up & share content thru packages presets & others.
My fourth & personal project was a new system for a filebrowser for windows for wich I was in the process of investigating & implementing functions, I already had a few interesting concepts, especially with a new drag'n Drop system, & where I found several touchpoints with many described itens on the appeal wiki. I had no developers, but was even dedicated to go as far as extending my limited director programming skills to make it work!
I have since then discored the appeal project wich touches dear to my heart & my way of viewing computing experiences, I'm starting to read the Kollaboration foeuns & having some input there, but possibly will at first develop my own way on how a user should interface with a system, & then implement & iterate my ideas based on what the community has been discussing there.
Just recently i was reading thru a microsoft office 12 blog on UI, & their work is astoundind, very interesting concets & innovation, & as much as most like to say how bad microsoft develops software, they have huge amounts of resources & manpower to do it, & since something like 2003 theyr humans relation & collaboration/development with users has been much greater than before, & their projects are maturing well. Apple is what it always has been with a strong & innovative UI team & with the possibility to have radical changes because they create & support all the hardware it runs on.
I've been increasingly discovering in myself a very keen sense on how interaction is performed & of creating new ways to interact with computer systems, So if the appeal team would like to have my direct collaboration I will be honored to do so, if not will continue to post & discuss my ideas in the kollaboration projetcs.
Thank you for bearing with this long mail,
Abel Santos /// alfatreze
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