Introduction to Gnome 3
gnome3.org
gnome3.org
1. How am I supposed to know what these icons do? Why even title them? https://img.skitch.com/20110118-biweei4eyuey217fisi7ks2d9f.p...
2. Eight of the eleven icons in the dock have significant title clipping. Did no one notice this? https://img.skitch.com/20110118-e1ykw7u3qf3gwmuhxaug28p5mr.p...
Usability isn't minimalism. It isn't translucent windows, rounded corners, or stark blacks and gradients. It's these details, and about a hundred others that I'll run into while using your software. These details can either add friction to whatever problem I'm trying to solve (and therefore add marginally to my bad mood), or they can remove it. If you don't ask these questions, you aren't even giving your users a chance.
Windows 7 has its problems too, but it's clear to me that the changes Gnome 3 is bringing are nothing more than what some out-of-touch developers think is what users want, without having actually asked users. Maybe I'm wrong on that assertion but that sure is the feeling I'm getting from this project.
Gnome 3 would have benefited greatly from a series of focus groups before development started or from snagging a high-profile UI expert to rap them on the knuckles whenever they had a bright idea like using 12 different font colors, sizes, and styles on the already-overwhelming dashboard screen.
Focus groups produced the interface overhaul to Windows Vista and 7. Rather than building on an existing, successful interface, they decided to be more mac-like, and managed to make the interface prettier but much yet less usable in the process.
I agree, gnome fonts are yuck. Even in the screenshot on the frontpage the fonts look awful - both in the text document and the dropdown menu headings.
For various reasons, the brightness of an RGB color value is not linear. This means that a checkerboard of white/black pixels will not look the same from afar as solid 50% gray. The correct shade is something like ~75%.
When anti-aliasing crisp details such as letters, this is incredibly important. Without gamma correction, there will be a noticeable change in brightness when a shape lies between pixels vs when it is pixel-aligned.
I think this is why Linux geeks tend to be vehemently opposed to anti-aliasing; they don't realize the rendering method they're using is crap.
Based on what metrics and evidence? I think it does a good job making me more efficient.
You do realize you are criticizing the topmost user interface details of a theme of an extensively themable early release. I think those "spare-time developers" have been focusing their attention on the API changes that the Gnome 2 to 3 transition impose and the new concepts introduced by the shell. The core seems very good. What you complain about is usually addressed in the configuration files for the theme and the names of the shortcuts. Multi-lingual support will bring some additional problems that should be addressed in the coming weeks. There are many dozen different themes that are compatible with Gnome. All those will have to be tweaked to look right.
Have a little more faith, for just about every computer that is responsible for your internet access runs on top of software written by people you would call "part-time programmers".
I'd trust their work over the one from Microsoft's full-time employees anytime.
Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings. Back in high school I had the time and inclination, and in fact I did so; now that I run a business, I'd rather spend that time doing actual development. Not to mention the moms and grandmas of the world who don't even know what a theme is. I, and they, need a UI that just works out of the box.
And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies. Let's not forget that it's for-profit companies with full-time programmers like Red Hat, Canonical, IBM, Intel, etc. that are more than partly responsible for the relatively wide enterprise (and desktop!) adoption of Linux today.
I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source; I use Ubuntu on my work laptop every day. I criticize out of the desire to see the open source movement develop something better, and that means not patting everyone on the back just for "working hard." It's precisely that kind of "gold star for effort" attitude that lets crappy software exist.
I am sure this will be a learning experience. It's alpha software, after all, and it is released in order to allow people to learn what works and what doesn't in the real world. As usual, with open-source, if you decide to use Gnome Shell right now, or in April, you'll be running the bleeding edge. I would say that, if you want to run it as stable software, you should wait until October. Open-source is developed in the open, as it invites intelligent criticism and grows stronger with it.
> Furthermore, I have better things to do with my time than spend time mucking around with configuration files and theme settings
Unless you want to design themes, you are not supposed to do that. I rarely do. I think I haven't done that since 2003 or so, and I was really going for a full customized desktop at the time. I did it because I wanted to do it.
> And finally, just about every computer that is responsible for my internet access runs on top of software written by large corporations who have hired people to develop for open source bodies.
I would like to point out a lot of Gnome has also been developed by a lot of full-time employees of for-profit companies too. It was you who called them "spare-time developers". I am not sure how it will play out with Novell's demise, but I trust other companies, like Red Hat and Canonical can chip in if needed.
> I'm not out to bash Gnome, Linux, or open source
I then certainly misread your post. I didn't realize you meant "spare-time developers" as a compliment. My bad. I am sure open-source has a lot to gain from the criticism of a bunch of spare-time experts.
Meant as a compliment, of course.
"The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis."
Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers.
So it appears to be just a fact that people are developing this in their spare time. That doesn't mean they're less competent than paid developers; of course not. It simply means that compared to a big company, like MS or Apple, they just don't have the same level of cash money resources to hire the right kinds of people--UI design experts--and buy the right kinds of feedback--real-life user testing, focus groups--that big companies do. And that very much shows in these screenshots.
Alpha or not, criticism is essential for furthering the project. If everyone just sat around and said "whew, lots of hard work, good job guys!" to whatever crap any OSS dev produced, OSS would never progress. I want Gnome 3 to be better because I use Gnome every day!
> If they didn't want to invite criticism,
I know there are plans for usability testing, but I don't know how they have progressed since this blog post http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/gnome-shell-usability...
One thing that concerns me is that they only decided to do usability testing in Feb 2010, but according to the Wiki page Gnome 3 has been in development since Jul 2008.
Shouldn't a huge UI overhaul receive incremental user testing to stamp out bad ideas before significant dev time is invested? After an alpha is delivered, does anyone really think that if one of their big paradigm changes is found to be disliked, that they will go in and remove or significantly change it? Maybe Gnome would, I don't know--but from my experience, once code is delivered in a semi-functioning state, it's very hard to overcome that inertia to make huge directional changes. (And perhaps no big change is needed--but from these screenshots I can say that so far I personally don't like the new direction.)
It looks like Gnome Shell has been in development since late 2008, but only got to a state where it was very usable in late 2009. http://gnomejournal.org/article/85/easy-breezy-beautiful-gno...
This approach seems to requires a monolithic application.
I would imagine it could be more open-source-appropriate to separate out the Windows manager (in charge of the details of font and icons) and the shell (the taskbar, start-menu, explorer-type-application etc).
Caveat: I'm working on a shell-like project myself. I suppose I might feel some satisfaction to see Gnome get it wrong but I don't want to see a monolithic system that freezes out alternatives.
Also, does 'shell' mean something specific to desktop people? What you detail as being the shell, I would call 'desktop'. But I could very well be out of touch with the current lingo.
The concepts look good, lets hope they sort out these details.
How can anyone see Network C…, Network P…, Network P… in the preference panel and not wonder if the truncation is too agressive?
Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter:
Notice how the tracking (spacing between letters) in the first item gets tightened to make it fit? It looks a little squished, but it's much preferable to reading dots.
The last item had to be truncated, but it happens in the middle and keeps the useful end information visible.
I was being honest when I said I was amazed at the GNOME truncation. I think an operating system UI that can't handle the names of its killer apps (e.g., OpenOffic…) lost its way somewhere.
Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around while everybody else can just cross-license with their own silly little patents. It may be possible they simply cannot afford the risk of doing the obvious thing.
Do you actually know that Gnome is actively "code around" some alleged patent violation?
Programming around any imaginable patent violation actually seems really bad, especially given that software patents aren't looking as strong as they once were. I vaguely Linus or someone saying it's better not to research existing patents, it limits your liability. But just on the principle of letting corporations covertly bully you, it seems bad. It seems much better to force the companies sue you and see what happens.
My googling shows Apple has a patent on the App-bar but there are plenty of App-bars out-there. Red-hat apparently was worried to remove a dock but the screen shots we see here clearly show something like a dock. But even thread discussing that situation sounded murky. Docky still seems to be distributed for example.
Apple has patent on "Open Type" but that also is used heavily in Linux.
I oppose that Free-type patents like all software patents but they don't scare me too much because sub-pixel rendering's value is debatable and it's not something that should affect programming at a higher level.
On the other hand, in the context of the thread, when rbanffy said "Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around", in response to "truncation in OS X is much much smarter", he seemed to imply there were patents on the level of simply truncating text.
Are there?
If there are, it sound horrible.
Well, if this is wide-spread, I find frustrating, even infuriating that it only appears in bits and pieces rather than there being a large "this is what software patents are imposing on us". The worst possible thing is to let this happen silently.
Yeah, I thought it looked pretty obvious because it was so bad it just hadn't been gotten to.
While I can't articulate on whether pango's ellipsizing is as smart as Apple's, it should be as simple as changing a single property from PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END to PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE.
In a nutshell: it's more of an introduction to GNOME Shell, which is just one part of GNOME3. It's going to be used by default, by old interface will still be available for those who want it. The UX is probably the least finished part yet, since a massive amount of work first went in invisible improvements for v3 (such as gobject-introspection).
Something the HN crowd will like: the Shell is written in JavaScript, has bindings to low-level libraries using gobject-introspection, uses JS libraries like jQuery, and comes with its own FireBug-like tool for inspection and modification at runtime. Since most of the look&feel is done in JS, you can just jump right in and hack left and right. One of most impressive demos at GUADEC2010 had a couple of JS oneliners doing various special effects on the desktop. Also, the whole thing is themeable in CSS, which is a lot nicer than doing gtkstyle theming.
Does this mean the ludicrously generous padding will be as easy to change as
html * { padding: 2px!important; }
Between this and Ubuntu's plans to adopt Wayland in place of X, there are some interesting times ahead for Linux on the desktop. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.
How else would you define it?
Huh.
I think Unity, which is my preferred desktop right now, is shaping up to be the nicest, prettiest and easiest to use desktop open source has ever had. I might even consider it to be the first open source desktop I could point my mother to and she could use it straight away. I'm fully expecting Unity to be just plain awesome in several cycles.
Gnome3 with the JS core is open for extension like we've never seen before in open source. I say that b/c of the ease with which someone could extend now...like it or not, JS has a lower barrier to entry than traditional tech used in linux desktops. I can't wait to see what people create for Gnome3 via this extension scheme.
I know I'll have both installed for sure...fun times ahead!
As said before, the theme and icons are really really lacking. I'm sure however that it will work great (and look great after some modifications like adding the Ubuntu font and Faenza Icons).
From the Try It link (http://www.gnome3.org/tryit.html):
GNOME 3 is under active development and will not be completed until April 2010. We hope to be able to provide live USB images really soon. Watch this space!
bad work is bad. GNOME developers are again ditching code that works (and it sucks).
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html >This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
This page reads much like a corporate ad.
> "GNOME 3 is crammed full of new features."
Is that a good thing?
For Gnome, I want: more streamlining, compartmentalization, removal of deprecated features, and optimization. Make it smaller and tighter -- only add parts conservatively and if they offer great value.
Seriously? Since when Beauty is that top priority for GUI? Usability, Gnome, Usability!
With OS X and Windows, I add the extraneous stuff - it doesn't come pre-installed and pre-enabled.
I'll stick w/XFCE, thanks. It's based on Gnome, but it doesn't have the cruft.
It's a shame, I think Gnome-Shell looks cool and I think GNOME3 brings a lot of UI/UX changes that have been needed for a while, but they're not doing themselves any favors giving the actual appearance a real chance to shine. The "GNOME" default icons are a pity, too.
edit, I guess it's not Metacity any longer... Mutter.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakubsteiner/5201953378/sizes/o...
What's the deal?