Hi, On 22. juni 2013, at 15:01, Timur Kristóf <[email protected]> wrote: > About a week ago at Devaamo I was fortunate to meet with a bunch of Nemo > guys. Together we discussed and debated ideas to move forward from the > current situation to one where Nemo looks nice and is a pleasure to use.
My $0.02 on our current situation: in the area of home UX, we have something which is mostly functional, but lacking polish in some rather annoying but fundamental areas, like "I need internet access but there is none, so please show a dialog asking the user to set some up". The main thing we've been lacking in that area is actually someone with graphical design talent. We need icons in a lot of different areas. Apart from that, it doesn't actually look too bad, and when I compare it to where we've been in the past, we're in very good shape now. That isn't to say that I think things couldn't be a lot better, but compare where we are *now* to, for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl7Djukoysc. Application-wise, we're worse off. We just don't have the developers to get everything done at once. We're improving, gradually, but there's a long way to go. > We feel that currently, the whole Nemo UI looks like just a cheap copy. That's pretty much because it is. We inherited our roots and most of our base software from MeeGo, and a large cluster of users/developers from the same place. Most of our work has always been designed around being similar, with improvements where possible (and developer time has been available). An example of this is the landscape-mode calculator with history etc. > We think we could do better than that. I imagine I'm not saying anything new here, but keep in mind that designing something takes an awful lot of effort -- even with a team of 2-3 design guys working more or less full-time, it's still a lot of effort to have to crank out: - platform design (the ideas/motives behind the design, how it ticks, user interaction design) - application design (what they contain, how they work) - graphical design (the production of actual assets used) All of these, I'd say, are necessary if you really do want to do better. I'd really like to see someone try. > Michael proposed the idea of making a whole new set of UI components for > Nemo, instead of continuing to use the deprecated MeeGo components, and we > think this is generally a good idea, especially now that we have Qt Quick > Controls in Qt 5.1. Just a quick note: there's nothing deprecated about them, other than your calling them that. I'm still actively maintaining them, and will continue to do so for at least the foreseeable future. If there are bugs, they will get fixed. If there are considerable pain points, I'll do my best to address them. Unrelatedly, as we should have learned from Nokia by now, just giving a finger to your developers and saying "learn this new thing" is not a very nice thing to do. These components were the developer story we had (and inherited from the N9), and we should continue to keep them working to keep existing applications, and developers, happy. > With Qt Quick Controls, one can just use a set of standard components while > still being able to maintain a custom look and feel. This means that we can > create our own components without further fragmenting the already fragmented > world of Qt Quick APIs. Despite the above, I would be very interested in seeing some effort taken into making controls usable over the longer term, as they gain us more 'free' effort and applications. I'd be a bit wary about jumping onboard straight away, given that they've only just seen an initial release, and given that our Qt 5-waters in Nemo are currently a bit under-tested, but nothing stops anyone from experimenting. Go wild! > The other important thing is to think about the home screen experience. > We think that the way forward in this regard is going for Wayland. It is. :-) > In other news, Robin and the others were able to get Wayland working on the > Nokia N9(50) devices That's very experimental at this point, but yes, I'd like it to be usable one day. Hopefully some other determined people can start to poke at it, also… :) BR, Robin
