30Apr / 2007

Don’t Do What I Want

I get tired of these dialogs. I see them as the point at which the development crew just gave up on me and their application.

Make a decision in your software! Be Bold! Be Brave! Don’t lay the impetus on me (the user) to understand certificates, SSL, file version incompatibilities, and other computer bull shit.

Sure the solutions to these dialogs are not always easy or obvious, but that’s where all the innovation lies. There are startups out there right now trying to glue together social solutions to these issues. GNOME is People! People are social! GNOME should have a solution here!

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25Apr / 2007

Big Board and the Search Stock

Continuing my earlier post on Big Board and Your Personal Stock
Search

The Big Board search interface is meant to provide a quick access search for a lot of different items. The search isn’t intended to be a Beagle or Tracker or desktop search replacement, it’s actually just intended to quickly search a small subset of handy items.

The system is heavily inspired from quicksilver and what the deskbar team has done, therefore we pretty much took the deskbar applet wholesale and placed it on Big Board. Currently we haven’t changed much of what the deskbar is doing other than changing it’s default search plugin set. But you figure the basics of application and web searching are included already, so lets not focus on that right now.

Searching You and Your Friends

Right now Big Board is setting what systems deskbar is searching by default, however we’re planning to dynamically change what search plugins should be available. Because the people in your Mugshot network have specified what online applications they use we can make the big board search adapt to search across those applications as well as your own.

Through these brave internet people you could search awesome photos and bookmarks and recommendations

With the current deskbar code base it’s a bit of a hack to have this working, we are pretty much shoving settings down deskbar’s throat. Hopefully lots of these issues will be cleared up when the code is worked on over the summer, thanks to the Google Summer of Code project.

Example

Here’s an example of how it could work. Lets say between myself and my friends we use a mix of these accounts listed.

Flickr
Delicious
Twitter
Facebook
And blogs…

Deskbar External Accounts Search Results

Mix of integrated results from different peoples public systems

When I search using the Big Board search I can get results from all of those accounts even though I might not have a twitter account myself. The search runs over not only my online accounts, but the publicly available online accounts of my friends.

Enhance Your Network of Resources

A little while back tigert posted how searching delicious gave better results than searching for “free fonts” on google. This is in part because delicious is a strong network of anonymous people who are interested in bookmarking good sites.

Now take that idea of a strong network of anonymous people and make that network stronger by making them not anonymous. You still have the ability to search the anonymous world, but why not use your different levels of connections through different types of networks to build some kind of trust, at least a greater trust than you’d get from the anonymous internet.

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23Apr / 2007

Netflix-ing Cinema 10

Way back when I was in school there was a local independent film series program called Cinema 10. Every week Cinema 10 would show new independent films and often have the director or producer appear for the showing.

I did miss a number of the movies they showed and wanted to add them to my netflix. The listing URL changed recently but I was still able to use the Internet Way Back Machine to lookup all the old listings. Here are the Cinema 10 Archives in case you’d like a listing of interesting indepentdent films to queue up yourself.

I’m not sure there’s a good way for me to display the queue of movies so you could add them to your queue. Let me know if there is and I’ll try, otherwise you should be able to find most of them easily by searching netflix.

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21Apr / 2007

The Document Journal

A little History

A while back when I was working on the OLPC project with Seth we took a good amount of time designing a new way for the people to interact with their documents. The design isn’t specific to OLPC, it was done because they were looking to take a new approach to documents and files. The approach we took is just as applicable to the desktop as it is to the OLPC.

What it is

I called it “The Journal”, it’s not the most inventive name. The Journal is an interface to the documents, images, movies, and other files you work with. It is designed to help you work with and retrieve your files, however it contains more than just files as it also understands events and people. It’s probably not the best approach out there, some of the ideas are a little half baked but it’s a new approach that I think gives interesting directions to take.

What it is not

While it may have strong correlations to many different existing projects and an implementation of the Journal will likely use some of these projects, they are not exactly the same thing. For instance the Journal requires a search across your documents, however the Journal isn’t a search service; it is an interface to finding your documents. An interface like the Journal could be fitted on top of a search service or a document store or another system, however the system or service running below isn’t the question to be answered yet, first we need to get a grasp on the interactions between a person and finding their stuff.

Currently the Journal isn’t any code, there are no secrets in it. It’s a bunch of designs based on a long time spent observing, researching, and brainstorming these interactions.

How it works

Imagine if your computer blogged about what you two did together every day. What would it say?

Bryan, you didn’t do much today (like usual):

You created GNOME Document Journal icon (30 minutes total)

You edited your GNOME Document Journal blog entry (4 times, 1.3 hours total)

You responded to emails (12 replies, 38 minutes total)

In a recent blog entry about re-designing my blog for the future I reworked my blog interface to enhance the experience of exploring entries for my reader. I added meta-data and tags and provided extra lists for recent posts, popular posts, and related posts on each post page. The Journal and a blog interface have a number of commonalities, re-designing my blog was a quick and easy way to experiment, understand and test some assumptions that apply to the Journal.

Similar Wavelengths

There are a lot of open source projects on a similar wavelength so it’d be great to get together and talk about these ideas to see where we meet. Here’s my incomplete list.

If you’re working on one of these projects and want to incorporate any of these ideas into your project, please do. These are simply ideas and if they’re good we should be sharing them, IRC or GUADEC or anywhere we need to start putting out our ideas for what to do next into something real.

More

So I’m looking for help. I’m hoping other people are interested in a new way of interfacing with their files, doing something completely different from Windows, Mac, and others that actually makes sense. I know the OLPC is interesting doing this

Since this is a new venture it’s going to take a while to cover and I don’t want to lecture, I’m hoping people want to take part in the design as a discussion. Before we go to a mailing list like desktop devel I wanted to write out a couple of entries describing what I think we know so far. So here it is, the first part in a several part series about the GNOME Document Journal.

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20Apr / 2007

Big Board is People

The photo stock on Big Board is really coming along. With no configuration from me it grabs the photo and video thumbnails from all the people I know through Mugshot and runs them as a small slideshow.

Animated GIF, watch the photos change!

Later we can work on adding information if a photo is new, people had commented on it, a slideout to see a larger version of the photo with description, and maybe a control to set a photo as your background.

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17Apr / 2007

Mugshot, Big Board, and the Online Desktop

Tomorrow night (wednesday the 18th) Havoc and I will be talking about Mugshot, Big Board, and the Online Desktop for the NYLUG.

If you’re in the area stop by and say hi. And anytime you can still talk about Mugshot, Big Board or the Online Desktop by hopping on our mailing list, IRC, or Community Group. Check out the contact page for all the details.

Update: The NYLUG requires pre-registration so you can’t just show up all “I know Havoc Pennington!” You actually need to register by 2:30 pm today.

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16Apr / 2007

Getting feedback early on

Reading Alberto’s recent post let’s make it easier made me think of last years New York Times article A Star is Made.

The article mentions computer programming and I do think it applies well to GNOME. Some people have been practicing (contributing and coding for GNOME) more than others and many of those people were probably able to get lots of positive feedback on their early work which encouraged them to continue working more. And thus a GNOME contributor is born!

I don’t think I would have started with GNOME had there not been such a quick feedback loop for working on the project. Luckily for me, friends of mine and I had created a group at school called the Open Source Institute where we could get course credit working on lots of different Open Source projects to learn about the software creation process. Beyond our small group of GNOMErs meeting other GNOME hackers at GUADEC and the Summit was a great way to feel more connected to the people responsible for all this cool work.

Just a small suggestion to not only focus on making getting started easier but creating a good feedback loop for new people. Perhaps using communities like GNOME Love to share patches made between new contributors.

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11Apr / 2007

I am Jack’s Web 2.0 Blogger

I recently switched over to wordpress, as much as I loved pybloxsom I wanted blog comments and web access to writing new entries. I could have done that all with pybloxsom, but I was moving hosting providers and I’m lazy and knew that wordpress has those things in by default. Sorry Will!

So I’ve been in the process of getting my blog into shape for this brave new world of blogging. Going over each of the Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog and trying to make sure that I have them covered in mine. I covered the sections that apply to my blog interface and not really my blogging style.

1. Topic

Interaction Design, though I don’t actually do much blogging about the topic in the general sense as much as I blog about the experiences and designs I’m working on. Perhaps my topic should be My Interaction Design…

2. Encourage Comments

I spent a good part of last night getting my comments system up to spec. I have the math plugin and the subscribe to comments plugin enabled. Most of the time spent adding these things is actually spent mucking with your theme afterward. Why aren’t these themes incorporating these kinds of plugins?

All that time spent and it still doesn’t look good.

3. Easy to Subscribe

I personally doubt that adding the RSS button to my page will make it easier for anyone to subscribe to my blog. I think anyone who wants to subscribe to blogs needs to use an application that knows how to find the RSS links in the blog page.

4. Include an About Page

I don’t have an about page yet, but I’m working on that. I’m probably just going to finish up my portfolio and use that as an about page since I don’t think I could find enough interesting stuff to say about myself that would fill a whole page.

10. Archive By Topic

I’ve got Categories and a Date Archive, a bit of a cop out but I think they both have their uses. I made sure my categories are listed above the date archive.

11. Include a List of Related Posts

The related posts plugin is a little too manual for me, but at least it does a nice job of adding in related blog entries near the bottom of each entry. I’m not looking forward to going back and adding keywords to all of my posts though, perhaps this will be a thing I do from here on out.

12. Allow People to Contact you Offline

Adding an “Email Me” blurb to the sidebar is a really simple way to solve this, though I think my future About Me / Portfolio page should have the contact information instead of cluttering up the sidebar with it.

15. Include a Top Posts Section

I like the WP-PostViews plugin for listing my most popular articles. Though since I haven’t been running it for very long it doesn’t really reflect the actual popularity of the articles.

16. Provide an Index

I’m not sold on the Index page, a classic feature where I don’t have a strong objection. But just because I don’t feel like it will hurt doesn’t mean it won’t have a positive effect; my gut says the likely effect would be clutter.

18. Recent Posts Section in Your Sidebar

I don’t really understand the point of adding a list of recent posts to my main blog page. It seems that if my main blog page is showing all my most recent posts that displaying just their titles in the sidebar would be superfluous. I did want to add this element to the single post view sidebar. My thinking is that if you’ve arrived at an individual entry in my blog you might be interested in the latest entry as well. I found a recent posts plugin from the wordpress plugin repository.

Usamagility

Now that I think I’ve improved the blog reader experience for my site it’s probably time to do some testing of all my assumptions. In the mean time I’m looking at Luis’ post on codes of conduct and trying to keep up with that.

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05Apr / 2007

Big Board and Your Personal Stock

Big Board

The Big Board isn’t a panel replacement, it probably doesn’t do half the things the current GNOME panel does and I wouldn’t imagine it would ever match all of the functionality. There’s lots of areas the panel handles like task switching where Big Board doesn’t want to touch, it’s out of the scope of the project. The intention of Big Board is be an connected companion to the online desktop. Connected meaning not just online but available locally as well.

There are lots of mockups of the board available on our developer wiki, but some are out of date and some are just ideas that haven’t been fully looked at yet. Right now this is what Big Board is and where those pieces are going.

Stocks

The Big Board is made up of different applet like things we call stocks. The stocks are pretty easy to write in python and can access account information through mugshot to grab feeds of the online services you use. The first stock on the board (located on the top) is the Personal (or self) stock.

Personalization

I covered a lot of this in the Big Board Design but most web sites make it immediately apparent when you log in that it knows who you are, while our desktop doesn’t naturally do this. Sitting down at another person’s GNOME Desktop doesn’t give me a hint who’s machine it is unless I start searching for their username in the home directory. (f-u-s-a being a possible exception that isn’t on by default, perhaps until recently)

Display the logged in users photo and name. This not only helps for the person to be sure they are logged into their Desktop correctly but it also helps us to encourage them to set an appropriate name and icon. Further down the road making sure people have set the correct name and icon helps with fast user switching, gdm face browsing, offering a decent default for buddy icons, and some other ideas we have about local network browsing. Currently this personal stock reflects your Mugshot image and name and will keep in sync with the site accordingly.

In the future we’ll be looking into using this personal area for the start point to editing personal preferences and logging out or switching users. You can see in this mockup the idea that clicking on the personal will give options related to either you or the computer you’re using.

Just below your picture and name we’re listing the we accounts you use. Currently these icons will take you directly to your account or profile page for the site it represents. The icon list serves as a decent starting point and begins to show how we’re giving web applications a similar presence to local applications on the desktop.

Search

Next up is the Search stock, where we took advantage of the awesome Deskbar applet to handle the “quick search” input and results display. The interesting twist mugshot gives to deskbar is that we can have the information necessary to search all of your online accounts (assuming they have feeds or web services) like delicious, digg, flickr, and others but we could also be searching your friends delicious, digg, and other accounts as well. Having the collective bookmarks of all your friends and colleagues at your finger tips might be a nice way to quickly find that thing you were looking for. More later…

I was tempted to write a post where I could give my side of a story and mis-quote and mis-characterize a person whose work I admire but I’m going to just talk about our prototype and it’s ideas so we can remain friends and find a way to work together. Plus I personally prefer ad hominem attacks opposed to that baby killing Gravely’s methods.

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Bryan Clark

Monthly Archives: April 2007

Don’t Do What I Want

Big Board and the Search Stock

Netflix-ing Cinema 10

The Document Journal

Big Board is People

Mugshot, Big Board, and the Online Desktop

Getting feedback early on

I am Jack’s Web 2.0 Blogger

1. Topic

2. Encourage Comments

3. Easy to Subscribe

4. Include an About Page

10. Archive By Topic

11. Include a List of Related Posts

12. Allow People to Contact you Offline

15. Include a Top Posts Section

16. Provide an Index

18. Recent Posts Section in Your Sidebar

Usamagility

Big Board and Your Personal Stock

aboot

Recent Comments

scategories

Flickr

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