Proposal: What's new
Hi guys, girls, men and women ;) I've already briefly mentioned the idea in the past but never really proposed it here. The idea is to add another option called What's new to the Help menu in all GNOME applications. As the name suggest it would contain a Grandma-Readable™ changelog. This means something closer to the release notes than to Fixed #123, foo shouldn't dereference NULLs in foo::frobnicate(). Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. -- Patryk Zawadzki ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Window titles
Hi Jon, Like most things in the HIG, all of this will most likely be up for review once we start to properly shape the user experience for 3.0. Well, really now is the time. We are in the process of shaping the user experience for 3.0. I encourage designers from Sun, Novell, Canonical etc to get involved now - while there is still time. I've literally been begging for involvement from these companies for a year now. And unfortunately, we haven't gotten much if any help yet. I don't know why. Perhaps the usability list has been seen as a bikeshedding list, far from useful, certainly it has been less active in recent years, but it would have been a perfect place to request for involvement (to answer your why). Prhaps it could be refocused to be about user experience, and getting together usability people, designers and artists. With both you and Jeremy Perry who are working hard on the shell design, with Andreas Nilsson and friends¹, with the experienced people from Sun, with designers from OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, in an open but focused channel, we could assert we have a trusted team in charge, and avoid accusations of changes being made by lone runners. Cheers, Frederic ¹ 4af9e957.6000...@home.se, The people in the room was me, Hylke Bons, Vinicius Depizzol, Jakub Steiner, Garrett Lesarge, Benjamin Berg and Kalle Persson. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Proposal: What's new
Hi, Am Mittwoch, den 18.11.2009, 10:12 +0100 schrieb Patryk Zawadzki: The idea is to add another option called What's new to the Help menu in all GNOME applications. As the name suggest it would contain a Grandma-Readable™ changelog. This means something closer to the release notes than to Fixed #123, foo shouldn't dereference NULLs in foo::frobnicate(). Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. Sounds like a nice idea, really. But then I'm facing this question: How do I specify version numbers in a grandma-friendly way? Do we expect granny to know about version numbers? Do we write those only for major and minor version changes (like six-monthly releases)? Do we call the single sections Changes since Spring 2009 (to avoid version numbers)? Regards, Sven ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Proposal: What's new
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Sven Herzberg he...@gnome-de.org wrote: Am Mittwoch, den 18.11.2009, 10:12 +0100 schrieb Patryk Zawadzki: The idea is to add another option called What's new to the Help menu in all GNOME applications. As the name suggest it would contain a Grandma-Readable™ changelog. This means something closer to the release notes than to Fixed #123, foo shouldn't dereference NULLs in foo::frobnicate(). Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. Sounds like a nice idea, really. But then I'm facing this question: How do I specify version numbers in a grandma-friendly way? Do we expect granny to know about version numbers? Do we write those only for major and minor version changes (like six-monthly releases)? Do we call the single sections Changes since Spring 2009 (to avoid version numbers)? Yes, I was thinking about using GNOME release dates instead of version numbers. My father might know what Ubuntu 10.1 is but he'd certainly have no idea what GNOME version it ran (or even what GNOME is). -- Patryk Zawadzki ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Proposal: What's new
On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: Hi guys, girls, men and women ;) I've already briefly mentioned the idea in the past but never really proposed it here. The idea is to add another option called What's new to the Help menu in all GNOME applications. As the name suggest it would contain a Grandma-Readable™ changelog. This means something closer to the release notes than to Fixed #123, foo shouldn't dereference NULLs in foo::frobnicate(). Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. I don't believe that most people care much, partly because they don't upgrade that often. This would be clearer if we had real personas to talk about. People who do care generally find the release notes online already. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. The UI clutter seems like a high price to pay for the slight possibility that this would help with writing release notes. -- murr...@murrayc.com www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Proposal: What's new
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Murray Cumming murr...@murrayc.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. I don't believe that most people care much, partly because they don't upgrade that often. This would be clearer if we had real personas to talk about. People who do care generally find the release notes online already. Not really. A lot of people have no idea what GNOME is. They just launch the application (or rather click on a document and the app launches itself), see that it looks slightly different and sometimes get curious as to why it looks different. Several times in the past I've read through NEWS and ChangeLog files just to tell someone what the exact changes were. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. The UI clutter seems like a high price to pay for the slight possibility that this would help with writing release notes. I wouldn't call adding a _third_ option to the menu that usually contains Contents and About... clutter. Even if it is clutter, we can still add it as a section in the manual. -- Patryk Zawadzki ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Proposal: What's new
I really like this idea, especially as we think about GNOME branding. One of the topics at the Marketing Hackfest last week was around our branding and how we partner better with the downstream distributions. I think this gives us a unique opportunity for users to think of GNOME and seeing the work we're doing upstream. This may also tie to another idea around how we can incorporate Friends of GNOME opportunities as well. I don't know if this would actually make it easier to write release notes - it may make it harder as the release notes would probably have more detail than something like this, so in some ways we're adding work. I really like how Fedora did their one sheet release notes via PDF for Fedora 12 [1] - something high level like that is what I would see here. Paul [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_12_one_page_release_notes On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 4:23 AM, Patryk Zawadzki pat...@pld-linux.orgwrote: On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Murray Cumming murr...@murrayc.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. I don't believe that most people care much, partly because they don't upgrade that often. This would be clearer if we had real personas to talk about. People who do care generally find the release notes online already. Not really. A lot of people have no idea what GNOME is. They just launch the application (or rather click on a document and the app launches itself), see that it looks slightly different and sometimes get curious as to why it looks different. Several times in the past I've read through NEWS and ChangeLog files just to tell someone what the exact changes were. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. The UI clutter seems like a high price to pay for the slight possibility that this would help with writing release notes. I wouldn't call adding a _third_ option to the menu that usually contains Contents and About... clutter. Even if it is clutter, we can still add it as a section in the manual. -- Patryk Zawadzki ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Proposal: What's new
On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 11:23 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Murray Cumming murr...@murrayc.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:12 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: Goals? Two really. One - to make it easier for users to discover newly introduced features. I don't believe that most people care much, partly because they don't upgrade that often. This would be clearer if we had real personas to talk about. People who do care generally find the release notes online already. Not really. A lot of people have no idea what GNOME is. They just launch the application (or rather click on a document and the app launches itself), see that it looks slightly different and sometimes get curious as to why it looks different. Several times in the past I've read through NEWS and ChangeLog files just to tell someone what the exact changes were. Two - to make it easier to write GNOME release notes. The UI clutter seems like a high price to pay for the slight possibility that this would help with writing release notes. I wouldn't call adding a _third_ option to the menu that usually contains Contents and About... clutter. Even if it is clutter, we can still add it as a section in the manual. I have plans to kill Contents in favor of more useful menu items. Some are concrete, short-term plans that I think we can push by 3.0. Some are more vague. Short-term, the stock Contents should be replaced by the actual title of the document or page pointed to. For most applications, this will be ApplicationName Help. This would then be followed by menu items that point to certain key pages in the help. More vague plans include auto-populating a group of menu items from bookmarks or recently viewed pages, as well as searching directly from the Help menu. So a Help menu might look like this: Search [___] --- ApplicationName Help Useful Page #1 Useful Page #2 --- Possible auto-generated page links --- Web links and other stuff --- About I actually really wouldn't be opposed to having a What's New page in the help. I think it could also be helpful to the documentation team, because it gives us a better sense of what else we need to update. Whether that's a key page worthy of a menu item is open to debate, though. -- Shaun ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Backup
Is GNOME interested in shipping an official backup program? I (as a long-time lurker) haven't ever noticed discussion about it. I feel the backup market currently has a lot of almost-there UIs and lots of duplicated effort. That might either mean it's a good time for GNOME to step in and polish one, or that it's a good time for GNOME to wait for one to 'win'. I'm not even sure that GNOME cares particularly, but it seems like a hole in the market. For full disclosure, I am notably biased in any such discussion as the maintainer of one of those almost-there duplicated efforts (an app called deja-dup). But I'd like to think that I'm more interested in a good user experience than my own ego. -mt ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Michael Terry m...@mterry.name wrote: Is GNOME interested in shipping an official backup program? I (as a long-time lurker) haven't ever noticed discussion about it. I feel the backup market currently has a lot of almost-there UIs and lots of duplicated effort. That might either mean it's a good time for GNOME to step in and polish one, or that it's a good time for GNOME to wait for one to 'win'. I'm not even sure that GNOME cares particularly, but it seems like a hole in the market. Usually what is best is for you to make an official proposal and explain why you think your module should be included in GNOME releases - personally I think if we dont have any backup mechanism I would probably give it a thumbs up. There is a wiki page I found for you which explains how we go about including modules in the releases: http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/ModuleProposing Cheers, -Tristan For full disclosure, I am notably biased in any such discussion as the maintainer of one of those almost-there duplicated efforts (an app called deja-dup). But I'd like to think that I'm more interested in a good user experience than my own ego. -mt ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
2009/11/18 Tristan Van Berkom t...@gnome.org: Usually what is best is for you to make an official proposal and explain why you think your module should be included in GNOME releases - personally I think if we dont have any backup mechanism I would probably give it a thumbs up. Fair enough, and I would be willing to go through that process for my own pet project, but I was interested in taking the temperature. My own project may not necessarily be the best fit (though of course I think it's the best thing since sliced bread). I wanted to make a 'fill-in-the-blank backup module proposal'. Unless such a discussion would best take place in the context of a concrete module proposal? -mt ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Michael Terry m...@mterry.name wrote: 2009/11/18 Tristan Van Berkom t...@gnome.org: Usually what is best is for you to make an official proposal and explain why you think your module should be included in GNOME releases - personally I think if we dont have any backup mechanism I would probably give it a thumbs up. Fair enough, and I would be willing to go through that process for my own pet project, but I was interested in taking the temperature. My own project may not necessarily be the best fit (though of course I think it's the best thing since sliced bread). I wanted to make a 'fill-in-the-blank backup module proposal'. Unless such a discussion would best take place in the context of a concrete module proposal? Personally I think that would be more effective; your proposal could very well (as it often does) inspire other proposals - but as its a volunteer project we really need your input as maintainers, we also cant assume that maintainers of said modules want to follow the GNOME release cycles. Cheers, -Tristan ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Michael Terry m...@mterry.name wrote: 2009/11/18 Tristan Van Berkom t...@gnome.org: Usually what is best is for you to make an official proposal and explain why you think your module should be included in GNOME releases - personally I think if we dont have any backup mechanism I would probably give it a thumbs up. Fair enough, and I would be willing to go through that process for my own pet project, but I was interested in taking the temperature. My own project may not necessarily be the best fit (though of course I think it's the best thing since sliced bread). If you intend to propose your app for 2.32 (aka 3.0), note that the proposal period has not yet opened, but you can get a head start by trying to follow the GNOME release schedule, and potentially migrating your code and bug tracking from launchpad to gnome.org. Infrastructure things like this help to reduce some of the hurdles in module proposals. Planning your next stable release to synchronize with GNOME 2.28 is definitely a good idea, along with getting some development releases out during the 2.27.x cycle. I wanted to make a 'fill-in-the-blank backup module proposal'. Unless such a discussion would best take place in the context of a concrete module proposal? Yup, that's usually how it works. More people become interested in joining the discussion when there's a specific module proposal. Sandy ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 17:30 -0600, Michael Terry wrote: Is GNOME interested in shipping an official backup program? I (as a long-time lurker) haven't ever noticed discussion about it. Where's the code? :) ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 17:30 -0600, Michael Terry wrote: Is GNOME interested in shipping an official backup program? I (as a long-time lurker) haven't ever noticed discussion about it. Where's the code? :) https://launchpad.net/deja-dup Sandy ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, 18.11.09 17:06, Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstr...@gmail.com) wrote: On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 17:30 -0600, Michael Terry wrote: Is GNOME interested in shipping an official backup program? I (as a long-time lurker) haven't ever noticed discussion about it. Where's the code? :) https://launchpad.net/deja-dup Hmm. This doesn't even do backups on optical disks, does it? Isn't that a bit weird? I mean, I am not asking for support for tape drives, but CDs at least? Lennart -- Lennart PoetteringRed Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 20:55 -0500, Alex Launi wrote: Who is backing up 600mb of data? Don't forget what year it is. We're not in 1993. Optical drives are legacy hardware. If you want to be sarcastic, you might want to update your analogies. DVD writers are common and can backup about 9 GB of data, and I have a drive here that can backup 50GB of data on a single optical disc. So, yes, backing up on optical media is a requirement, if only for partial backups (say, backup my thesis work every week). ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Backup
2009/11/18 Lennart Poettering mzta...@0pointer.de: Hmm. This doesn't even do backups on optical disks, does it? Isn't that a bit weird? Yeah, it's not yet feature-complete. Patches welcome. :) The optical experience would be a bit tricky/different, and I've been trying to avoid adding half-baked features. I suppose such issues would best be raised in an eventual module proposal. -mt ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
