This mail is about the UI/artwork/ergonomy decisions to take for UMC targetting short term.
During the last few weeks Christophe, Vinicius and a few others proposed some mockups and documents to the community. We all need to find better ways to agree on which direction to take regarding these documents. People voting and replying to each other across two moderated mailing lists is messy and slows down the process. So why not use a forum with a poll system? Designers start a new thread about a very specific topic (examples: main menu look-and-feel, navigation tree ergonomy, icon sets, animations...), showing their work. People reply, give remarks on that thread and vote by checking a checkbox. For each thread we define a deadline for which a decision has to be taken. What do you think? UMC Marketing team? About the new Elisa UI, the ongoing rewrites of Elisa and Pigment are quite in a hurry for the deadline we have in mid-july (GUADEC). We already have a working new UI but decisions need to be taken about ergonomy and animations. The problem is that time is running out :( That's why the Elisa team at Fluendo has taken the decision to reimplement the 0.1.x frontend with various fixes for the following reasons: - right now it's the better visual identity of Elisa. However it has some ergonomy issues that will be fixed thanks to new features of Pigment like implicit animations and rocking widgets like the GridView (more later in this mail). - the community based reflection about ergonomy/artwork/animations takes time, which is a good thing all-in-all, but for mid-july we won't make it, for sure. - at Fluendo we don't want to make decisions about the new UI without consulting you folks at UMC and the Elisa community. It would later lead to minor/major code refactorings we'd like to avoid. So we are backing up to the old-style UI, with a zoomed menu (http://elisa.fluendo.com/screenshots). That decision was taken also because quite a few of you didn't like the new UI proposal which looked a bit less original and with too much text. The zoomed menu is currently being redeveloped from scratch and will be easier to use. When you keep pressing right/left keys the navigation speed increases, which improves the menu usability. For large media folders navigation we will use the new Pigment Grid widget which is able to display a grid of pictures/videos, so that the user can easily navigate in them and giving the UI a more eye-candy look and feel. We'll soon make a screencast demonstrating this bling powered widget :) Christophe is now working on improving the global ergonomy of this UI. However, switching back to the 0.1.x UI doesn't mean that we are letting the new UI Christophe and others of the UMC team have been working on. The 0.3.1 default UI will be the zoomed-menu one but the release will also include the "new" UI which will in time come to maturity. The zoomed-menu based UI will be default until the new UI ergonomy, animations and artwork are validated by the Elisa and UMC communities. Users eager to try the new UI will only need to tweak their Elisa config. We will publish a schedule for the artwork, animations and ergonomy validation before the end of the week. Philippe
