On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 17:11 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: > Hi, > > The release team is gathering comments from various teams to get a > proper idea of which of March or September 2010 is more appropriate for > the release of GNOME 3.0. The decision for the release date is following > what we set in the 3.0 planning document [1]: we want 3.0 to be out in > 2010, but we also want to make sure that 3.0 is rock-solid; your input > will help us take an informed decision. > > It'd be great if someone could summarize the status of the work that is > being done in GNOME Shell, and how March or September would work for > you. (Oh, and I know Owen sent a mail to d-d-l, but let's pretend I > didn't see it ;-))
What's there now ================ GNOME Shell as it exists now is certainly usable; the major functionality of using a desktop are there - switching between windows and applications, launching new applications, accessing your recent documents, etc. And I think the basic technical architecture of Clutter+Mutter+GObject-Introspection+Javascript has been well validated. What still needs work ===================== The two big things on our plate right at the moment: Messaging: One of the important components of the GNOME Shell design is its interaction with notifications and with messaging. We've just started in on the implementation of this now, and the initial progress is promising, but there's going to be quite a bit of work to fine-tune the interaction and figure out how apps participate in this. App browsing Right now, the shell basically regurgitates the GNOME menus in a slightly different form when you go to browse for applications beyond those that are shown as your favorites. We're currently working on figuring out a better ways of presenting this browsing activity and tying it in with searching. Beyond this: Document browsing There's no big picture story about how you access and find your documents in GNOME 3. The default here is to just say that GNOME Shell replaces "Recent Documents" in the panel, and the rest stays the same. But all the interest in Tracker, Zeitgeist, etc, shows that people aren't that satisfied with the current ways this work. Whether significant progress is made here for GNOME 3, or we stick with the default situation, is really about whether people want to continue experimenting as currently, or whether a push is made to unify the experiments, figure out the big story, and get something into place in the short term. Putting experiments into the default GNOME 3 desktop would be a mistake, though hopefully we can provide (via the gnome-shell extension system, etc) a good platform for further experiments. Anyways, largely outside the narrow scope of the shell. Accessibility: Two big areas of work here: one is keynav, the second is exposing the user interface tree to AT's. Keynav is partially there, but there's a ton of work to make sure that *everything* is keynavigable. Exposing the UI tree will likely fall out of the work that is being done with Cally, though the exact relationship of that with Clutter (is it a separate library) is not, to my knowledge, completely finalized. But exposing a raw tree of clutter actors is in no way interesting, so there's probably considerably *more* work to make sure that the tree exposed from gnome-shell meaningful represents the objects and actions on them, and likely some AT-side to work to figure out how to interact with objects in gnome-shell that had no correspondence in the GNOME 2 desktop, like the Overview itself. (Editorial: unfortunately, accessibility in GNOME has too often been partial technical solutions and unfulfilled promise. While not regressing on the technical side is important, I don't think that's the interesting thing - the interesting thing is to make progress on the user experience here. So we shouldn't be grading ourself on whether we continue exposing a UI tree to AT's, but whether we have AT's that can take that information and present a coherent user experience based on it.) Internationalization: Clutter and gnome-shell build on top of Pango, so there isn't really any problem on the output side of things, and we're using gettext for localization, but input is a bit of a problem. We now have our text entry widget hooked up to GtkIMContext, but preedit isn't there, and auxiliary windows won't be shown if you are typing in the activities overview (since no windows show there.) And of course: User testing: We have not (in general) set down users in front of GNOME Shell and watch how they succeed and fail with it and how they like it. I think we're at a point now where this begins to make some sense, and I'd hope to have some initial results by the end of the year. Time considerations =================== There's not, in my estimation, to finish the current work, user test, change it, polish performance and quality, and then ship that by March. What part of that equation got cut out would be flexible, but the end effect would be that a GNOME 3 in March with GNOME Shell would be beta quality - we'd have to either lock it down and freeze it without finishing everything, or we'd be changing stuff up to the last minute. If we were really desperate for a GNOME 3 at this point, we could do that, but I don't get the sense that is the case; generally the lack of a GNOME 3 isn't blocking people from building desktops with incremental improvements. It makes more sense to take our time and do a really good job. _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
