Hey, On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Robin Burchell <ro...@viroteck.net> wrote:
> Hi, > > On 22. juni 2013, at 15:01, Timur Kristóf <timur.kris...@gmail.com> 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". > Regarding home screen design, actually, what we have now is almost worse than what we had about a year ago. I'm confident that we could easily do better than that. > 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. > I agree. In this context however, we're even worse off from a design perspective than from a development perspective. There is no design language nor any design guidelines or anything. We feel that having such things is important so this is something we are trying to improve also. > > 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. > It's nice to see that there are good initiatives in the community. However we think that it's time we started making our own look and feel instead of trying to copy someone else's. > > > 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: > > I never said it is going to be easy. > - 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. > > What I meant was, let's start moving to a different direction. This doesn't mean that we want to drop the previous set of components entirely, only that we would greatly encourage moving to a different direction. > > 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! > > By the time we make up our minds, decide which way to go and come up with a viable design, Qt Quick Controls will become a stable release. > > 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… :) > > Andrea and myself are quite interested in that work also. Regards, Timur
