[indiana-discuss] [desktop-discuss] 2008.11 UI Spec

[Calum Benson]

On 13 Aug 2008, at 17:24, Brian Cameron wrote:

> I suspect that I would be more liberal than you about what should be  
> included.  I don't quite feel so strongly that we should never, ever  
> have multiple programs to do the same thing.  For example, I think  
> GAIM and Xchat would compliment each other rather than conflict.   
> But, I don't think we need 4 IRC clients
> in the menus either.

I think we're probably in broad agreement.  Provided QA were happy  
with both of them, I'd certainly have no problem having Pidgin and  
Xchat co-exist on the menus, for example, because Pidgin, quite  
frankly, is a pretty poor IRC client anyway :)

(That said, the one thing we were almost universally praised for with  
our very first JDS Linux release was how clear and simple the menus  
were compared to other distros at the time.  And although JDS Linux  
was aimed at a difference audience, we probably have stiffer  
competition now than we did in those days.)

> At any rate, I think winging about adding a dozen or so branding  
> patches
> to add "Hidden=true" is just a waste of time.  If that's what the
> usability guys say we should do, lets just get it done.

Well, I guess the main thing is to make sure we're going about it the  
right way before that dozen becomes a hundred or two.  So I'd suggest  
we probably need some buy-in from (a) Solaris marketing/c-team/whoever  
about the consequences for the Nevada desktop user experience, and (b)  
from RE on any proposed technical solution, e.g. automatic generation  
of those branding patches based on something like a package whitelist  
(that is, a list of all the desktop files we *don't* want hidden, per  
the Nevada UI spec).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems