Project GoneME Fixes Perceived Gnome UI Errors 576
An anonymous reader writes "Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. The intention is to create a community of people, who are willing and interested to help fixing issues brought up by people for a very long time and make the vision of a usable Desktop in the means of good old Unix fashion become true. In case you are interested to help, please join the project. Plenty of people have shown interest and welcome this step and the IRC channel got filled up within a short time." Update: 07/26 02:33 GMT by T : A project mailing list has been set up for anyone interested in taking part in this endeavor.
"Perceived" Gnome UI Errors? (Score:0, Interesting)
Go for it... (Score:1, Interesting)
Gnome Usability (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad to see someone improving it, but we always have to ask the question -- how much better might things be if the GNOME and KDE teams were working together instead of separately? That is, coding/philosophical differences aside. Granted, choice is good, and it's their choice what they want to work on.
Gnome should have 2 modes. (Score:5, Interesting)
beginner mode would be where Gnome is currently heading. Export mode is where us, the experts would like to see Gnome go. For instance, why not have two types of file selector dialog? The current one, and if in export mode, a new one which allows people to actually type the full path if they want to? No spatial Nautilus when in expert mode.
Actually, in any of the modes, one should be able to easily configure a feature according to the needs. For instance, maybe a beginner would still like to type a full path, so somewhere (not in gconf only) there should be an option to enable it.
Out of the box, Gnome should be made for the common user. But we should have options for the power users.
I'd love to, but.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Workspace Desktop Pics (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gnome Usability (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing they SHOULDN'T change (Score:3, Interesting)
Otoh, yes, GNOME is bloated and getting rid of the registry concept is a good one. Spatial Nautilus sux as well. Yuk.
Re:Gnome should have 2 modes. (Score:4, Interesting)
There were 3 levels
Beginner
Intermediate
Expert.
It didn't work.
People had different expectations of what features/options should be in which level, and so in the end, everyone just switched to Expert all the time, so that they could see all the features.
Nothing to see here, move along (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm willing to give this effort a year just to see whether the rhetoric is backed by any ability.
Re:Gnome Usability (Score:3, Interesting)
You should try Pogo. (Score:0, Interesting)
I have a little thing called Pogo [ibiblio.org] that I built. I like to think of it as an alternative to GNOME and KDE's "panel"..the area in KDE and GNOME's design where things begin to go horribly, horribly wrong.
Pogo is a programmable application launcher. It has no menus. Instead of running your mouse up and down and around in circles going from menu to menu to find the program you're looking for, everything is right up front. If it's not, you use the mousewheel to rotate new launchers into view, You can color code them, move them around, and best of all, you can control each icon's appearance using shell scripts. It comes with a simple command you can use to send Pogo messages, like "flash this icon 3 times", or "move this one icon 3 spaces to the right, and change the color of this other one to blue", lotsa stuff..It's flexible enough that you can use it as a graphical front-end to shell scripts. Pogo comes with a nice looking clock, for example. All it is, is a bash script running in the background, extracting the hour and minute values from
Here's a link to Pogo's Development Page [ibiblio.org].. Youll find screenshots and everything there.
For example, I have a co-lo out in New York. To keep an eye on it, I have a little shell script running in the background on that machine that sends my Pogo a message about once every second. Meanwhile, here in Arizona, one of my Pogo's icons flashes once per second, to indicate the server is alive and well. It will turn blue or yellow, depending upon how much CPU activity is taking place on the box. I could have another script running that could cause the same icon to flash red if there's something weird appearing in the system log. Clicking on the icon then brings up an ssh session with the box. It's not that hard, believe it or not. Pogo's build for that sort of thing.
Hopefully you'll find it useful. It's free.
Cheers,
Bowie
Re:Gnome should have 2 modes. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't.
I hated browser mode.
In fact, I rarely used the file manager with it
Now with spatial I use it far more.
> There's no button to turn it off.
You simply want a button that you're going to use once and never need to use again? That just sounds like bloating up things. Imagine if your computer had a huge button for each of the dip switches, that once you'd set them the first time you built the computer and then never ever needed to change it again...
An attempt to clear up some misunderstandings (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion. And, there are tools in Gnome that are very powerful, yet very simplistic. Look at it this way: Most often, it's not the tool, it's the user. Having more features won't make the user more powerful. It will make the average user less powerful and confused, whereas the power user will have no problem using the simple interface. I consider myself a power user, and I've been using Gnome since 2.0. In every part of my life, as a programmer, student, musician, whatever - I prefer simplicity to advancedness. Because something simple created to perfection will always be better than something advanced. This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency.
This new project surprises me a little bit. It's not because it's a good thing, but because I'm amazed that this man actually has the opportunity to gain support anywhere. I always try to be objective and understandable, but in this case it's not possible: Ali, or oGALAXYo, tends to troll around on osnews, and formerly the gnome.org mailing lists, accusing people, and generally being angry, and when people tell him to stop he replies with yet more accusations of how people attack him. He's kinda like Dave on Paradise Hotel (Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times).
I have absolutely no faith in that Project GoneME will do anything successful for the Desktop users. Especially when led by a man who in one post love a part of gnome, then two days later hate it - or suddenly hates Gnome as a whole and loves KDE. Then, all of a sudden, KDE is the wrong part. I'd love to see a roadmap for this project. And I'd love to see it change every day.
First of all, it complains massively about simple things as button orders, things that users don't notice on any other plan than an intuitive one - and he says things about f.i. esound (yes, it needs to be replaced) that are just cluttered with ignorance - a sound daemon has its use, ask any distributor.
Oh, and Gnome has a bugzilla [gnome.org]. That's the place to tell anyone if you've found a bug or feature missing.
To end this post, I'd just like to say that I'm not a Gnome official in any way. I do support and participate in the community, but many people seem to think that everyone talking about Gnome positively belong to the Gnome set of developers, and often end up talking negatively about Gnome because of things that _are not part of Gnome at all_.
A better name... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nick
Re:File Types (Score:3, Interesting)
Then you will be happy with this [gnome.org].
not really a fork (Score:3, Interesting)
He's actually not proposing a fork per se, more like a place to collect patches to the mainline gnome that are unlikely to be accepted into mainline gnome anytime soon.
-jim
Re:Gnome Usability (Score:2, Interesting)
- Mozilla:
It is designed to the X "standard", ie drag and drop, cut and paste. As such, it can work in any "standards compliant" desktop. It just happens to use gtk (or xlib, qt nanoX, win32
- Gimp:
Well, how could a program that was designed, and implemented before gnome be designed for gnome? It just happens to use gtk (well, gtk was written for it)
- Openoffice:
Now, this one was not designed for any linux desktop. It has its own widget set that does not even conform to the look and feel of gnome or kde.
(Though there is work to get it to look like kde)
[advertising=on]
OT: for those who have used gtk-qt from freedesktop.org and thought that it looks crap. Try the cvs version, it is improved. (I have made some changes)
Re:Gnome Usability (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:An attempt to clear up some misunderstandings (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the fundamental, and as far as I can see, baseless argument made by too many GNOME fanatics and UI designers.
So what you are saying is:
perfect abacus > perfect quantum computer
or maybe:
perfect quill pen > perfect ball-point pen
Or is that not what you're saying? Can one of you "simplicity always rules, even if necessary benefits have to be excised" people for once actually provide a rationale for this claim that doesn't include a whole bunch of other baseless assumptions?
Re:The shit has hit the fan (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the exact same "we know what's best and we'll bully everyone else into shutting up" that we've begun to expect from some of the Gnome zealots.
You should _really_ look at what you're writing. It's rude and uncalled for. Someone wants to create a piece of software to fill his own needs and you go on like this?
Seriously dude, this is just rude. You should start to realize that a _lot_ of us who have been using Gnome since around v1.0 are having a really hard time using the new Gnome 2.x, since all the nice features are taken away from us. And we actually applaude people like this Ali guy for finally doing something about it.
You want to stop him doing it? Fine, put your money where your mouth is and do some real coding instead of spending so much time yelling at other people for coding software they like.
Shame on you.
coexistence of different WM elements (Score:2, Interesting)
use many of the KDE and Gnome parts.
It is for example possible to start a gnome-panel within
blackbox by typing "gnome-panel" into a terminal and then
get rid of it, if no more needed. For KDE applications, one
often gets annoying messages like
" QPixmap: Cannot create a QPixmap when no GUI is being used"
and sometimes the application does not work.
I would like to see more elements of different windows managers
to coexist peacefully with others without actually have to run
a specific window manager.
Re:Gnome should have 2 modes. (Score:3, Interesting)
I beg people to include 'Advanced User []' boxes, tick them and have all the good old options re-appear, and if somone clicks on a help box tell the user what the function is and if you don't understand what it is click on this to disable advanced user access.
Digging though another program (gconf) just to change the position of buttons on X or Y is insane, yes it works but I'd rather have the options somewhere near the program I'm using.
Re:Reverting the button order is a stupid idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Invite Sid Meiers (Score:2, Interesting)
Even back in the days of Railroad Tycoon, he was able to present understandable and usable information at the single pixle level.
User Interface does not, and should not, mean "looks like MS Windows".
If Sid Meiers isn't willing to help (lead) the effort, then study his best work before starting.
Xfce4 (Score:2, Interesting)
Xfce4 is built with GTK2, so it will display pretty antialiased fonts. It already has an Enlightenment-ish desktop root menu and pagers, and it can be easily configured to behave more like E as well. For example, you can turn off the taskbar and replace it with an iconbox. In my experience, Xfce4 is quite stable, and it doesn't seem to hog system resources, either.
GUI simplification database (Score:4, Interesting)
The base widget class should include properties to represent a default value, whether the widget appears at all, and possibly a "shown default and disabled" state. The base widget container class should include a widget for managing the default values and display states of contained widgets. Then the desktop containing all those containers and widgets could have preset collections of widget states, identified as a range of expertises, and a collection of user-configurable setting collections.
It would be easy to set some apps to more expert states than others. That could be done remotely, or at login, by an administrator. Suites of apps could have "expertise overlays" which set expertise for more options in the GUI when performing operations with different sets of apps. And a learning feature could offer to hide infrequently used widgets in their new default state.
Design Issues (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that there's a few issues that means that free desktops need to play "catch up" with the likes of Windows.
When a free software project starts, *GENERALLY* (not all the time) the coders are writing the code because they want/need it. They aren't coding with users in mind, they're coding something that they want and think might be useful. So the project is designed for a skilled computer user, and if usability comes after that as a result of enough requests, it is already "playing second fiddle". The reason that a certain usability feature doesn't get into the code might (but of course not always) be simply because the coder uses the desktop system, and considers the addition to over-simplify the system to the point of almost being patronising (There are many examples where Windows can be considered extremely patronising to a "power user").
Speaking of being patronising, there is also a notable point in regards to the attitude of many geeks/hackers. As the "Portrait of J. Random Hacker" [catb.org] says in the "Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality" section:
That, and the brief mention of "Stupid People" in the section entitled "Things Hackers Detest and Avoid" is also part of the problem. Hackers/coders tend to react very badly to timewasting tasks and stupidity, so when an inexperienced user has a problem with a current system, they tend to receive ridicule and/or abuse, rather than their concerns being taken on board. This doesn't happen in every case of course, but the most common answer to a technical question is "RTFM". It's ultimately hard to really take what inexperienced users need on board when you just consider them to be stupid for not being able to use your current system.
Another thing is really the power of the (normally Bash) shell. A lot of *nix users are people who grew up on the system before GUIs really became popular, and they have got so used to a command line system that they often shun the very idea of a GUI system. When you're so comfortable with a shell window where you can do just about anything you need to, there's less of a focus on usability of a desktop system. Provided you have a basic file browser, which is usable and functional, there's a danger of not fully developing the file browser, on the strength of the fact that you can get to where you want to go much more quickly with cd /home/blah or similar at the shell. With Windows, the command line is so utterly piss-poor by comparison (yes you can get 3rd party Unix command line apps, but on it's own, it sucks), you're basically forced to use GUI systems for just about everything.
There's also a bit of a Catch 22 situation about it. Unless you get more inexperienced users on the system, you won't get more design suggestions from the usability viewpoint. But if you don't make the system more usable, you won't get more inexperienced users.
So what to do if you don't have your own basic user focus groups like Microsoft? Well, you use some of the resarch that they have done. While UI designers have been accused many times of making desktop environments too much like Windows, at the end of the day, that is what people are used to. If you want to move a user from Windows to *nix, they will have a much better experience if they are sitting infront of a system which is similar enough to their previous system that they can find their way around with little assistance. I know that many people try to set themselves apart from Windows users (although there is a large degree of elitism about that) but at the end of the day, Microsoft have been de
Re:Go for it... (Score:2, Interesting)
In my opinion, (which might be different from yours, which I respect) gnome is based on a too old user interface paradigm. Because KDE doesn't have rigid UI requirements like gnome, a couple of apps have made use of a much more modern UI approach. K3Bs interface for instance is excellent.
Making gnome applications have a more modern look and feel will be a monstruous undertaking. It's great so many want to participate in this project, which could be the start of something really cool.
My (uncommon) complaint about Gnome... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm definitely in a minority here, but my biggest complaint about Gnome is the way the source code is distributed.
I've developed a perverse habit of wanting to compile large portions of my system from scratch. Gnome is a nigh-incomprehensible mass of interdependencies and it's a mess trying to figure out what the minimum set of packages is that I need for a particular package.
There IS a mistaken impression that KDE is simpler in this regard because it has "fewer" libraries, but I don't think that's true - it's just that most of the necessary libraries are collected into a much smaller set of source trees. The Gnome equivalent of QT (a single source download) is "Glib and GTK [and Pango and ATK?]". Gnome requires "Orbit" and "Gnomelibs" and "Gnomeui" and "libidl" and "gnomeprint" and "gnomeprintui" and "bonobo" and "bonoboui" and "gconf" and "gconf-editor" and "gtkhtml" and "gnomecanvas" and....probably a dozen others that I've forgotten - and if you want to compile them up "by hand" (which I often do, glutton-for-punishment that I am) you waste half of your time trying to figure out which order you need to compile them in because the interdependencies aren't obvious.
It appears that most or all of the discussion of Gnome improvements has to do with user-interface issues, though, so I don't think anyone on the Gnome side feels this is an issue.
As far as I can tell, KDE actually DOES have equivalent individual libraries to all of these...but all or nearly all of them are part of the combined "kdelibs" source package. I think this kind of coordination is why KDE is often perceived to be more cleanly "integrated" than Gnome (whether it really is or not).
I wouldn't care except that some of the individual Gnome applications really do seem to be really nice. There doesn't appear to be anything remotely approaching GnomeMeeting for KDE, for example...
Actually... (Score:1, Interesting)
On a more serious note, some ideas are good, but the way he's going about it is wrong. And patches to make the button order different is silly - if you could just stop for two seconds and actually read the buttons, or see the icon.