- Journal
- The Fruits of the First Few Contributor Meetings
The Fruits of the First Few Contributor Meetings
Submitted by cassidyjames on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 00:12For the past few weeks, we’ve held our Contributor Meetings (previously referred to as "Developer Forums") via IRC. A bit of just about everything has been discussed, and there’s been a good amount of decisions made.
Upstream Collaboration
First off, we’ve rolled out plans for continued and closer integration with upstream projects like GNOME. With GNOME now sharing a similar AppMenu idea, we’ve decided to make our implementation compatible with the one in GNOME. We’re also building a new version of Dexter using gnome-contacts as a base to avoid duplication of effort.
We’re undergoing talks with Yorba regarding the possibility of combining Postler’s fine user interface with the great backend of Yorba’s super-secret mail client Geary. We've reached out to Yorba and they seem to be just as excited as us; this could become a very powerful partnership and we look forward to the good things to come.
Lastly, we’re planning on preparing some of our widgets for possible inclusion in GTK itself so more people outside of elementary can build better apps. This doesn't guarantee their acceptance, but we'll do the best we can to make them available to all.
Switchboard
Besides focusing upstream, we’re working on making our own creations, like Switchboard, even better. A new effort to improve Switchboard plugs is underway; we’re documenting and organizing the process further. We’ve already put together a structured list of plugs required for Luna (the old one became a bit messy during the sprint), and we’re working on a complete plug template and a guide to porting GNOME Control Center plugs to Switchboard which will allow us to keep some GNOME plugs and redo others.
Granite
Work is also underway on a new consistent tab bar widget—dubbed the “dynamic notebook” widget in Granite—for all elementary (and potentially other GTK-based) applications. The design is mostly drafted and is undergoing some final touches, while the implementation is already underway. This dynamic notebook widget compliments our existing static notebook widget and brings both new features and a slick design to our tab bars.
In addition to adding the dynamic notebook widget, we’re actually dropping the hinted entry widget from Granite. This is due to upstream GTK’s adoption of the similar placeholder property in the standard entry widget.
Structure
Concerning the internal structure of elementary, we have approved the creation of a management team that will drive all the elementary applications teams on Launchpad. Our IRC channel for developers will stay open for everyone (at least for now), so feel free to join the discussion.
Design/UX
We were also able to make a few decisions regarding design and user experience. We discussed ditching minimize and how we can make our apps more intelligent without minimize. As Daniel Foré has previously suggested, the minimize button will be gone, but the close button will do the same thing from the user’s perspective. Thus, the OS will take care of the memory management for the user. Lists (on graphical interfaces) will also be redesigned for consistency, after some discussion and investigation. These decisions will of course take more planning and work before you see their effect, so stay tuned.
Third Party/Community Apps
Finally, we took a look at two new “third-party” or "community" apps by elementary community developers: Footnote and Pantheon Terminal. The first is a note-taking app designed by Harvey Cabaguio (~BassUltra on DeviantArt) and being developed by Tom Beckmann, and the latter is the terminal app created by Adrien Plazas (aka Kekun), which has been revived by David Gomes (aka munchor). We’ve acknowledged their existence, we welcome their involvement in the elementary platform, and we’ll be looking forward to what comes out of their efforts.
We’re excited about all of the excellent discussion and the massive influx of community involvement with these new contributor meetings. Be sure to let us know what you think, and if there’s anything you think we could do better. Also, make sure to attend the next Contributor Meeting this coming Saturday at 18:00 UTC (in #elementary-dev on irc.freenode.net) if you’re interested in these discussions!
This post is a collaborative effort of many of the contributors who attended the meeting, including David Gomes, Shnatsel, Daniel Foré, and more.
Slightly off topic. Has anyone seen http://asturix.com/on/?
Very off-topic. And no, I've never heard of that. Looks... interesting.
The original subject was about "sharing a similar AppMenu idea" https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointThree/Features/ApplicationMenu. The Appmenu mockup does not look very "elementary" (simple) (in my opinion). However, the Asturix developer (a 16 year-old "Hacker" from Spain)appears to have come up with something different and refreshing.
All i want is just a fallback option to add a minimise button to titlebars. :)
You can use gconf-editor or ubuntu-tweak to add the minimise button back.
I don't want to sound like a license snob, but I always like how elementary defaults to use the GPL 3 license. Yorba on the other hand uses LGPL 2... will you guys work to dual license the email program with Yorba?
I'm not sure, but that's a good thought. We'll bring it up for sure.
This sounds great. Keep it up!
It's awesome that you're getting attention, but still all what u do might go to waste unless u make hardware or partnership with a partner, it has been the number one problem for all linux oses. a good idea would be raspberry pi 25$ computerwhich I am sure everyone will just buy!
The number one problem for Linux is that it sucks.
I've been seeing people trying to explain why Linux never took off ever since I started using it and it's all BS. Everyone's favorite explanation is that it's "hard to use". Seriously? Hard to use? That's what people tell you when they realize it sucks but don't want to hurt your feelings. Unfortunately Linux neckbeards are too buried in their fanboyism to admit this, so they keep making excuses.
Not that making a hardware partnership is a bad idea. I think having a workable business model is essential if elementary wants to get anywhere, but that alone would never make a difference.
The truth behind it all is that the low level CLI/Kernel part of the system is just great, solid as a rock and amazingly dynamic allowing it to be used in a great variety of devices (like your phone, TV, microwave, wireless router, and many others) and that is because it is a single project with thousands of contributors focused into a unique objective of ever improving.
The high level graphic desktop environment on the other hand is constituted of multiple projects with different goals, different ideas and many times too few developers to actually continue improving over time. And this fragmentation leads to broken/incompatible applications that sometimes make us envy our friends using OS X and even (just sometimes) Windows.
And that is why it sucks.
But, if elementary can unify developers into a common goal and prepare a stable, full featured and easily usable desktop environment and set of associated applications that please both general users, designers and developers, then Linux will finally take of as an all purpose operating system.
I think the problem isn't so much fragmentation as it is lack of taste from the people in charge. Take KDE for example, there's a huge amount of talented people working on it, it's a healthy project, but still fails. Why is that? Because their vision sucks, and the project will always suck if their vision sucks. Same can be said about Gnome, Canonical, etc.
Fragmentation is bad because it splits manpower, but those projects have more than enough people to make a good product and they still don't. The truth is manpower isn't really that important. Just look at elementary, they have what? 20 developers?
This doesn't even have anything to do with FOSS. You see it in corporations too. I think this article is very relevant.
What you said is pretty relevant indeed, sometimes you can have the best guys and still make a huge pile of garbage, like the last release of Final Cut Pro where Apple proved that it can also make stupid things.
The article is indeed relevant, I admit I did not consider such limitation and perhaps what Linux really needs is just better designers, with better taste.
Lets hope our friends at elementary have good taste, which they seem to have, and that they do not shy away from it as the project grows bigger.
To be fair, I might have oversimplified the issue of fragmentation. There's a lot more problems that come with it, but I don't think I'm the best person to talk about them. The point stands regardless.
I don't know how much we can expect from elementary, but with everyone on Linuxland failing for decades, I think it's good to know there's some new blood to shake things up. Let's see what the future reserves us.
Anyway, if you are interested, Paul Graham has a really nice essay on the subject of taste. You can read it here.
I love that notebook app, it's great for studying!
And I think Linux is a great OS for schools!
But that app need more things like filters and things like that, and it looks very basic! And it should have the option underline, bold and italic, and even change the size and color (I'm assuming that you can change the font in the settings!)
When i become a developer i will try to make apps like that one (for schools)!
Its great to see you avoiding duplication of effort :)
I like the idea of the way the window's freeze, but would it be possible to have a preference (Easily accessible) to actually turn this off? And possibly a per-application configuration as well?
No, developers will be the one's to decide the way their app works when closed.
so what is the difference between elementary apps and "third party" elementary apps?
In the context of the Journal entry, I referred to "third-party" as apps that aren't officially developed by elementary, but follow the HIG and fit in. It's a difficult distinction, however, since many core devs help out with or start so-called "third-party" apps. I've amended the post to be a little more specific.
Third party apps are made by third party developers.
Not really.
It's all app except those shipped with the OS and development tools for them, or so I was told. I don't think it's a good name for them, thought. It's a rather complex subject and it's not completely clear yet, see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/non-official-ppas
Hm, I agree this is a difficult distinction. I like the sound of "Community Apps," personally. I've added my thoughts to the whiteboard. :)
So, the window controls will be like iOS ? If you minimize a application, it 'freezes' ?
Or am I completely wrong?
We don't force the freeze - the app decides what to do. For example, here's BeatBox's behavior: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/beat-box/+spec/music-in-bg
Still not quite happy about the direction of the window controls... However, I think the rest is spot-on.
Totally agree with you. Everything seems quite perfect except the implementation of window controls because what if you want to fully close the application so that the next time you open it, it starts afresh. That's not like minimise. Just adding a minimise button wouldn't do much harm.
The whole point is in not starting afresh, but not consuming extra memory either. All apps should pick up where you left them.
Also is there a blueprint where window controls can be discussed?
but can we really disregard the fact that someone who uses elementary will also use third party apps?
if they do, then some apps are "hidden" for all practical purposes when they are closed, and others start afresh. isn't that a serious consistency issue?
Then what happens is the user will decide if the trade off is worth it. If your 3rd party app doesn't do what they user expects to happen, they will most likely become frustrated and remove it. Users are fickle beasts ;)
So what if you want the app to completely close so that next time you open it starts afresh?
Existing apps are already inconsistent with each other, so there's no way we could be consistent with them.
Besides, people really should build smarter apps. This is one of the ways to make them do it.
true, but with the minimize button, users get the option to definitely hide a window instead of closing it and hoping it will save state
Definitely looking forward to Luna (and every thing that comes after it)!
The integration of Appmenu and Gmenu will be awesome.
BTW you have included a reallly old screenshot of gnome-shell.
There's some progress on this already: http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1325964638.png
xapantu rocks, as usual :)
The screenshot was from the whiteboard on GNOME's site discussing AppMenus, but yeah, it does include an old style of GNOME Shell in the background. Either way, the idea is identical. :)
Link to whiteboard: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu
Getting more and more excited about Luna with every update
Great! it's also really nice to see post like this (i hope to see thing like that more often) :D
Idea (probably already told many time, but whatever): You guys should set up an "elementaryware" site to host 3rd parties application approved by the elementary Team, that respect the HIG of the elementary Project. And with a nice single repo to install them (something like http://haikuware.com/ do for haiku)
Well yeah, the idea is around for a long time and there's a blueprint about it, it seemed to cause some controversy though, I've spread some at least :D
We actually have lots of info for posts like this but we don't have enough manpower to publicize them all. That's why Journal posts were so sparse recently.
I think eventually when we have our own AppCenter that we'd love for it to be filled with apps that target elementary specifically :)
Until we do it, we need https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elementaryos/+spec/non-official-ppas
That notebook app looks really helpful is blog integration planned?
Thought the same, wordpress or blogger plugin for example. It looks awesome.
Contractor will rule them all.