On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Martin Pilkington <[email protected]> wrote: > Just to respond to a few points: > > On 20 Dec 2009, at 10:33 pm, Jonathan Lange wrote: >> As Michael says, the Launchpad API was intended to enable experiments >> like these. However, were I you, I would be seriously considering >> working to improve the existing UI, rather than creating my own. >> >> Changing the UI of Launchpad.net might be a little harder and a less >> fun than writing a new application, but it does give you an instant, >> large user-base and a sizable body of developers. It also means that >> whatever improvements you make are shared with the entire Launchpad >> community. > > This is part of the reason I did the mockups of improving things a bit in the > current UI. However, what I'm hoping to achieve is something that is > radically different. Personally if I was to go further with my mockups I'd > probably want to remove 50% of the stuff on each page. Obviously that > wouldn't go down too well, which is why I'm wanting to do this in a separate > UI, that allows me to experiment with a much simpler, but (if done right) no > less powerful UI.
You say "obviously", but it might go down better than you think. > On 20 Dec 2009, at 11:28 pm, Ian Clatworthy wrote: >> I'm also planning to experiment over xmas with making Bazaar Explorer a >> better "LP desktop client". The integration with LP code hosting and >> merge proposals is pretty nice now[1] but there's plenty of scope for >> making the workflow even smoother IMO. >> >> My focus will be on adding value over the current feature set rather >> than on porting browser-based functionality to a desktop app. For >> example, I'd like to make it easy for users to create "assistants" or >> "dashboards" so they can see at a glance (and action) stuff like: >> >> * unanswered questions >> * new bugs >> * merge proposals >> >> for a batch of projects they care about. I'd like these to be soft-coded >> in an xml file so others can build whatever assistants/dashboards >> interest them. launchpadlib will be key to providing this magic. >> >> If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd love to hear/see your >> thoughts on useful assistants/dashboards, particuarly for new users. > > These sound like a very interesting idea. I feel that these items are far > more useful to launchpad users than what is currently visible. And the > ability to build your own would help provide a custom data view for launchpad > so you can optimise for each project. I think that you should maybe provide > the ability to create a "class" of dashboards. For example, if you set > yourself as being in the project leader "class" you will probably want a > different set of dashboards to if you're just in an occasional contributor > "class". So as well as letting users build their own, there are a series of > pre-built dashboards sets and they can choose which set they want by saying > how much of a contribution they want to make to a project. This really solves > one of the key issues I have with LaunchPad's UI, which is that it can show a > lot of irrelevant information in certain use cases. FWIW, we'd love to have a more dashboard-oriented view for almost every part of Launchpad. I think we could improve a great deal without providing the level of configurability that you & Ian are talking about. jml _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
