Category: Usability and interaction design
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A program's obsolescence
In 2005, I had a crazy idea upon which I started the Specto project. Initially, I thought I’d call my revolutionary piece of software WhileYouWereOut (continuing the world’s tradition of ill-chosen project names), because it really was about solving a core “want” in my life: to leave my computer alone and catch up with events…
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Fedora 18: now keyboard-friendly to everybody
It is fashionable these days, especially for the Slashdot crowd, bloggers, kernel hackers and other people depending on “feature X that has not fully polished”, to throw mud at the efforts that have been made towards redesigning the Fedora Linux installer. When people trash the work you’ve been doing fully in the open for over…
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Persistent tab states, render UX polish and other things
With some help from luisbg, I finally reworked and merged a 2-years-old patch of mine. It turned out to be less trivial than expected, because we had to change the settings backend to allow loading/reading configuration files at runtime for our dynamically-generated tab components. So, what the heck does this mean to you? Automatically saving…
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How do you visualize grouping?
Here’s a tricky usability question: how would you represent the actions of grouping and ungrouping clips on a timeline? (Un)grouping is used for changing the way selections affect a set of clips. It allows you, among other things, to separate and remove the audio from the video of a clip. It is very hard to…
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Autohiding fullscreen toolbar, error dialogs and file format filtering
Here’s one of the reasons why I’m not exactly in a hurry to learn C. When you ask me to read through C code, this is what happens: No jokes. Even after simplifying and compacting the code, it’s still such a pain for me to navigate through C that I actually felt the need to output…
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Restoring from backups
I’m currently in Málaga for the GStreamer hackfest. Hopefully, many bugs will perish. In the meantime, here’s a quick status update of stuff I’ve been doing in recent times in Pitivi. Cleanup the code for gtk actions so that the code is more readable and robust, fixing 629208 in the process. Cleanup the menus (again). Avoid…
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Naming schemes
A question has been bugging me for some time: what’s the reasoning behind the dconf hierarchy/naming scheme as can be seen in dconf-editor? org.gnome.*, org.gtk.*, ca.desrt.*, org.freedesktop.* … okay, I get that those are meant to look like reversed URLs, that part makes sense… but not as much when you have desktop.gnome.*, desktop.gstreamer.*, apps.*, a11y.*…
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Pitivi's startup time
So, since it seems everybody’s been talking about startup time these days, I’ll admit I tend to secretly obsess over that too. Well, it’s not so secret given that I’ve blogged about profiling work on Specto and PiTiVi before… anyway. I believe you should provide your developers with the fastest computers to do the development,…
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Improving GNOME PackageKit on big screens
In the same vein as my don’t make me scroll post, I sent a couple of patches Richardwards to, among other things, solve one of the biggest itches I had with gpk: the fact that I had to care about sizing it up constantly on my 1920×1200 24″ monitor. Before, if you started gpk-application (or the…
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Various performance and usability improvements in PiTiVi
I have been attending the Desktop Summit since the opening on Saturday, and it’s been a great experience reconnecting with familiar faces and meeting new ones. Tomorrow, the PiTiVi and GES hackfest officially begins, in room “1.308/2” (the building is at 24 Dorotheen Straße). Come join us at any time of the day (and since…