Category: Usability and interaction design
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Snowy hackfest and Boston Summit 2010
Fellow hackers and designers, I will be in Boston from November 4th to 8th. I have been summoned there to participate, as a designer/tester/usability freak, in the glorious rise of a better user interface for Snowy, the open-source online synchronization and collaborative editing project for Tomboy. Thanks to sponsorship from the GNOME Foundation, I will…
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Desktop in the Shell
I once wrote a nice rant about the inadequacy of the desktop metaphor. In the light of the upcoming GNOME 3, the more document-centric Shell and the browser-mode nautilus (instead of spatial mode), I wanted to remix my thoughts a bit. Note: I am not a developer and I am not on the Shell or…
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GNOME pour les non-ordinateuriens
Ce qui suit est une étude de cas spéciale, à long-terme (longitudinale, comme on dirait en psy) d’un bureau GNOME adapté à un type d’utilisateur très particulier: un non-ordinateurien pur (plus hardcore que ce que décrivait Ploum). Depuis des années, je fais le soutien technique pour les membres de la famille qui roulent Ubuntu/Linux (j’ai…
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Hello, PiTiVi happenings, Sintel
Hello Planet GNOME (thanks Lucas for adding me)! You may know me from the Specto or PiTiVi projects, or as your worst bugzilla nightmare: That’s it for my introduction, if you really care about who I am besides a bug infantryman, you can take a look at my home page (make sure your browser is…
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Icon view in the Source List
Stephen “lostcookie” Griffiths recently started coding on PiTiVi, learning the codebase as he works through the PiTiVi Love list. He has done awesome work on the source list to implement an “icon view” mode and has managed to somehow not become insane while I pointed out all his mistakes and bugs 🙂 The icon view…
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Single channel waveforms
Brandon committed a one-liner fix for bug 607614 today. Indeed, until now, if you inserted a 6-channels (5.1) clip into the timeline, you ended up with nonsense like this (as some called it, “corduroy waveforms”): This has been solved, and it now looks like this:
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Move playhead on click, modeless splitting, full-height playhead
This week, Brandon has been doing great work in polishing little bits of PiTiVi’s timeline workflow. Indeed, he has made a second attempt at implementing my “move playhead on click” paradigm, and merged his changes into PiTiVi’s master development branch. A side effect of this is that we now have “modeless splitting” (ie: splitting is…
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Themed ruler widget in PiTiVi
Edward released PiTiVi 0.13.3 today. Brandon recently spent some time working on the timeline’s ruler, and his changes are part of that release. So now, it looks like this: What’s the difference, you say? It looks slightly better visually; The timecodes are displayed/managed in a smarter way; The “ticks” are now on the bottom of the…
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Performance vs usability
I had an idea to make Evolution display more human-readable/stuff-I-care-about-only sender information, but it was scrapped. It is sad when you hit technical roadblocks in technology (here, performance considerations) that trump usability (well, that and the fact that the devs were not too enthusiastic about the idea to begin with).