Hi
I have been running Big Board ever since it was brought up on this list. Some questions and observations:
Is this meant to replace both the top and bottom GNOME panels? I don't see a equivalent of a task bar if it's meant to replace them both. Why hasn't the package been submitted for review? The color on the panel is a plain white and doesn't match the rest of GNOME system colors. I see no way to move the panel around either. I can understand the lack of a quit option if it is meant to replace the panel.
Is big board tied to mugshot? What if I don't have a mugshot account? Trying to change the pic shown on the identity, application descriptions, more button in calendar etc launches mugshot pages. The icons including facebook, flickr etc doesn't have any tooltips. The functionality of deskbar is not obvious.
The more link on applications launches a side panel. The descriptions near the search button sometimes overflows the boundary. Example: Epiphany. Installing a new application via the menu launches a command line yum command. Though it works this is crude. You should be using the Yum API and integrating with Pirut instead. Clicking on another area of the desktop doesn't close this menu or even move it away which is annoying.
There are three sections - applications, photos and calendar. If i don't intend to use any or all of these sections in the panel there is no way to remove them although clicking on it minimizing the section within the panel.
Rahul
On Monday 07 May 2007 12:59:30 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Some questions and observations:
Many of these might be answered by http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Big_Board specifically the Design and Development links.
As to why it isn't in Fedora yet, most likely because it's not ready for wide spread use.
On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 13:08 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Monday 07 May 2007 12:59:30 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Some questions and observations:
Many of these might be answered by http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Big_Board specifically the Design and Development links.
As to why it isn't in Fedora yet, most likely because it's not ready for wide spread use.
It is not in fedora yet because getting stuff into Fedora is reasonably hard... Colins review request for the required hippo-canvas was stuff without a reviewer for a month before I reviewed and approved it, I guess Colin is now looking for a sponsor to get hippo-canvas in...
Matthias
On Monday 07 May 2007 13:14:05 Matthias Clasen wrote:
It is not in fedora yet because getting stuff into Fedora is reasonably hard... Colins review request for the required hippo-canvas was stuff without a reviewer for a month before I reviewed and approved it, I guess Colin is now looking for a sponsor to get hippo-canvas in...
Yes, sometimes finding a reviewer is not an easy task, especially if you don't persue it at all. There is a HUGE queue of unreviewed packages. It takes a little bit of effort to find a peer to review it for you.
On 5/7/07, Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com wrote:
On Monday 07 May 2007 13:14:05 Matthias Clasen wrote:
It is not in fedora yet because getting stuff into Fedora is reasonably hard... Colins review request for the required hippo-canvas was stuff without a reviewer for a month before I reviewed and approved it, I guess Colin is now looking for a sponsor to get hippo-canvas in...
Yes, sometimes finding a reviewer is not an easy task, especially if you don't persue it at all. There is a HUGE queue of unreviewed packages. It takes a little bit of effort to find a peer to review it for you.
Can you explain to me how review process works or point me to some blog post about it?
Who reviews packages that are in queue? Fedora members? Red Hat devels? Community?
Is there anything the community can do to review these packages? And what does it exactly mean.
Thank you all for your answers.
Valent.
Valent Turkovic wrote:
On 5/7/07, Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com wrote:
On Monday 07 May 2007 13:14:05 Matthias Clasen wrote:
It is not in fedora yet because getting stuff into Fedora is reasonably hard... Colins review request for the required hippo-canvas was stuff without a reviewer for a month before I reviewed and approved it, I guess Colin is now looking for a sponsor to get hippo-canvas in...
Yes, sometimes finding a reviewer is not an easy task, especially if you don't persue it at all. There is a HUGE queue of unreviewed packages. It takes a little bit of effort to find a peer to review it for you.
Can you explain to me how review process works or point me to some blog post about it?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/ReviewGuidelines
Who reviews packages that are in queue? Fedora members? Red Hat devels? Community?
Anyone interested.
Is there anything the community can do to review these packages? And what does it exactly mean.
See the review guidelines. If you got questions about reviewing post to fedora-devel list.
Rahul
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Monday 07 May 2007 12:59:30 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Some questions and observations:
Many of these might be answered by http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Big_Board specifically the Design and Development links.
I did read them of course. They don't seem to answer my questions though.
Rahul
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi
I have been running Big Board ever since it was brought up on this list. Some questions and observations:
Awesome! We'd love to hear the feedback you have on it.
Is this meant to replace both the top and bottom GNOME panels? I don't see a equivalent of a task bar if it's meant to replace them both. Why hasn't the package been submitted for review? The color on the panel is a plain white and doesn't match the rest of GNOME system colors. I see no way to move the panel around either. I can understand the lack of a quit option if it is meant to replace the panel.
Big board is the begining of the replacement for the panels. However we're not working on any kind of task switcher replacement just yet, that's another task that we believe can be focused on separately. Right now we're just using the big board with the existing bottom panel, moving the top panel applets down accordingly.
Since we're working to get some other elements together it's likely that big board won't get that kind of panel configuration you expect for a while as those are features which require lots of small correct details and thus tend to drag down development of other areas.
A quit option is probably a good idea for big board for now, we just haven't put it in there yet. Really the inclusion of a quit option has the inverse graph of the inclusion of other panel features; at some point they'll meet in the middle :)
Is big board tied to mugshot? What if I don't have a mugshot account? Trying to change the pic shown on the identity, application descriptions, more button in calendar etc launches mugshot pages.
Right now it is tied to mugshot so if you don't have a mugshot account that you're signed into it tries to help you get one (why it's launching all mugshot pages). A mugshot account is quick, painless, and free to get and the big board won't do fun stuff until you have one. Right now big board is using the mugshot application over dbus to talk to request information from the mugshot server. It's possible to have an alternate backend to much of what mugshot service provides, it would just require a lot more preference dialogs for the user to fill out and a lot of work for us to do in parallel to building big board itself. However we know that an alternative backend is going to be needed eventually so effort has been put into the code making it flexible to that need.
The icons including facebook, flickr etc doesn't have any tooltips.
Ah, but they could! Grab a shovel and start digging! That part is probably only a line or two of code [1]
The functionality of deskbar is not obvious.
We're looking into some ways to make it more obvious. [2] That one has the code out there in a previous version already, we just need to dig it up and get it back into deskbar.
The more link on applications launches a side panel. The descriptions near the search button sometimes overflows the boundary.
Yep, that's a known bug, but since it isn't too big of a deal (i.e. doesn't hamper usage) we've ignored it. The app browser is lacking lots of visual quality to it, but we've been heads down on getting things like the installation and suggested application search working.
Example: Epiphany. Installing a new application via the menu launches a command line yum command. Though it works this is crude. You should be using the Yum API and integrating with Pirut instead.
Yep, on rawhide I believe you should be seeing system-config-packages doing the installation. The yum command line utility is just a hack for now because the sys-config app didn't support taking a package name as a command line argument.
Clicking on another area of the desktop doesn't close this menu or even move it away which is annoying.
Yes, known problem. It's a little frustrating that it's staying on top right now.
There are three sections - applications, photos and calendar. If i don't intend to use any or all of these sections in the panel there is no way to remove them although clicking on it minimizing the section within the panel.
Ah, you're talking about the soon to be Portfolio Manager! (we call the sections stocks) The PM is going to be modeled after the application browser interface, which we aren't at a good point to stop with. So you should get a very similar feel of being able to search all the stocks you have installed while looking at a quick view of the stocks you're using. Also similar hooking into a web service that delivers the most popular stock in the category / search query you're viewing; helping you find new stocks.
You might want to also look at the Online Desktop Project page [3] which has lots of other information about areas of development that include the big board.
Cheers, ~ Bryan
[1] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Subversion [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/deskbar-applet-list/2007-April/msg00018.html [3] http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Online_Desktop_Project
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi
I have been running Big Board ever since it was brought up on this list. Some questions and observations:
Is this meant to replace both the top and bottom GNOME panels? I don't see a equivalent of a task bar if it's meant to replace them both.
It's meant to replace the top panel. The bottom panel will be the task bar.
Why hasn't the package been submitted for review?
It depends on hippo-canvas which is awaiting a sponsor.
The color on the panel is a plain white and doesn't match the rest of GNOME system colors.
I think GNOME upstream was talking about moving to white. But, true. It does need more visual design.
I see no way to move the panel around either. I can understand the lack of a quit option if it is meant to replace the panel.
The former will hopefully be added soon. As for a quit I'd like to be able to minimize it to the bottom panel basically or the like, but it needs some interaction design there.
Is big board tied to mugshot? What if I don't have a mugshot account? Trying to change the pic shown on the identity, application descriptions, more button in calendar etc launches mugshot pages.
We're using Mugshot as the server basis, yep. We're using it as basically a public service where we can store data online like the preferred applications and photo.
The icons including facebook, flickr etc doesn't have any tooltips. The functionality of deskbar is not obvious.
Hm, tooltip functionality seems to have broken in the canvas recently.
Can you explain a bit more about what you expected the search box to do, but didn't? Or it did that you didn't expect?
The more link on applications launches a side panel. The descriptions near the search button sometimes overflows the boundary. Example: Epiphany.
Yeah, I hope to fix that soon.
Installing a new application via the menu launches a command line yum command. Though it works this is crude. You should be using the Yum API and integrating with Pirut instead.
Right.
Clicking on another area of the desktop doesn't close this menu or even move it away which is annoying.
Hm; did you expect clicking elsewhere to close it? What outside of the desktop context did you want to switch to?
There are three sections - applications, photos and calendar. If i don't intend to use any or all of these sections in the panel there is no way to remove them although clicking on it minimizing the section within the panel.
Yeah, portfolio management is something we will need to add, but I think in the short short term we are going to get rid of the calendar stock and replace it with a people stock which should be more useful.
On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 15:29 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
Rahul Sundaram wrote: It's meant to replace the top panel. The bottom panel will be the task bar.
Why hasn't the package been submitted for review?
It depends on hippo-canvas which is awaiting a sponsor.
I'm willing to be your sponsor.
/B
Colin Walters wrote:
Is big board tied to mugshot? What if I don't have a mugshot account? Trying to change the pic shown on the identity, application descriptions, more button in calendar etc launches mugshot pages.
We're using Mugshot as the server basis, yep. We're using it as basically a public service where we can store data online like the preferred applications and photo.
So what happens when I don't have a net connection or just don't want to have a mugshot account? Can big board cope up with that and produce a reasonably good user experience similar with what we have with our current "offline desktop" if you will.
Can you explain a bit more about what you expected the search box to do, but didn't? Or it did that you didn't expect?
It looks like a text box though the icon tool tip says "Show previously used actions" and I tried typing in browser (some grayed text that says search here or a title "Search" might make it more obvious) which showed up a list of applications with the word browser on them which was expected but there was some entries like login photo which was unexpected. It produces a search list from yahoo which was unexpected since I don't yahoo for searches. I couldn't figure out why or how I could change it to use a different search engine or just turn off web searches. I was expecting it to pick up the search engine settings from Firefox.
In general I find applications unexpecting launching web pages and grabbing focus annoying. Reminds me of advertising popups that distract me from whatever task I was set to do. Big board does that and does that unexpectedly. For example, more in the applications stock launches a hybrid between a menu and a panel while other similar sections launches mugshot pages.
I think having more settings within the application itself while picking up whatever settings it needs from mugshot, flickr or whatever service on the background would be better. Changing my photo id, adding some applications stock, installing ,uninstalling one from the system via the menu etc.
I want my local desktop experience to be coherent connected applications rather than a loose collection of web pages linked from a application which is what big board feels like.
Hm; did you expect clicking elsewhere to close it? What outside of the desktop context did you want to switch to?
Yes. A normal menu would close when I click elsewhere. I think the GNOME slab menu which looks very similar in structure does the same. I was trying to access another application via a icon on the desktop or just read my mail instead of big board menu staying on top. It would have been ok if it didn't close as long as it would just moved out of my way and stay on the background when I click something.
Rahul
On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 01:33 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
So what happens when I don't have a net connection or just don't want to have a mugshot account? Can big board cope up with that and produce a reasonably good user experience similar with what we have with our current "offline desktop" if you will.
It wants you to sign in, but you can use the app browser in an offline mode right now, though admittedly it isn't as good.
Keep in mind that the big board is intended to be part of the larger online desktop mode, and I think Mugshot fits pretty well for someone who mostly uses online apps.
It looks like a text box though the icon tool tip says "Show previously used actions" and I tried typing in browser (some grayed text that says search here or a title "Search" might make it more obvious)
That's in the mockups actually, but it's difficult to implement right now due to the way we reuse deskbar (a fix for this would really be a fix for deskbar).
which showed up a list of applications with the word browser on them which was expected but there was some entries like login photo which was unexpected.
It searches full description, I assume the login photo chooser had some random bit of text in there. We might refine the search to have some concept of relevance, but I think it's pretty decent for now.
It produces a search list from yahoo which was unexpected since I don't yahoo for searches. I couldn't figure out why or how I could change it to use a different search engine or just turn off web searches. I was expecting it to pick up the search engine settings from Firefox.
A lot of people (including me) will likely be using Google for searches, but - there is no Google search API for programs any more. Trust me if we could we would!
I'm sure the deskbar developers would love if this was fixed somehow too, but the only Google API available now basically requires a web browser, and I'm not sure how that could be fit into the search results cleanly.
In general I find applications unexpecting launching web pages and grabbing focus annoying. Reminds me of advertising popups that distract me from whatever task I was set to do. Big board does that and does that unexpectedly. For example, more in the applications stock launches a hybrid between a menu and a panel while other similar sections launches mugshot pages.
Right now I think it is annoying that firefox doesn't come to the top; I think we may have to pass a timestamp or something to gnome-open. But a big part of the online desktop is integrating with web pages, so we will need to make sure it works well.
I think having more settings within the application itself while picking up whatever settings it needs from mugshot, flickr or whatever service on the background would be better. Changing my photo id, adding some applications stock, installing ,uninstalling one from the system via the menu etc.
We're trying to avoid duplicating existing stuff such as the list-infos portion of Mugshot.
I want my local desktop experience to be coherent connected applications rather than a loose collection of web pages linked from a application which is what big board feels like.
A big goal of the online desktop is to make the experience better for people who already mostly use web applications like GMail/Flickr etc. In isolation the big board using the browser may seem different, but I think the picture will make more sense when we have things like e.g. GMail under the Applications menu.
Yes. A normal menu would close when I click elsewhere. I think the GNOME slab menu which looks very similar in structure does the same. I was trying to access another application via a icon on the desktop or just read my mail instead of big board menu staying on top. It would have been ok if it didn't close as long as it would just moved out of my way and stay on the background when I click something.
I've removed the keep_on_top flag in Subversion which should help.
Colin Walters wrote:
Keep in mind that the big board is intended to be part of the larger online desktop mode, and I think Mugshot fits pretty well for someone who mostly uses online apps.
I am thinking that if we are going to have big board by default on F8 the user experience should be better than or atleast comparable to what we have already.
A lot of people (including me) will likely be using Google for searches, but - there is no Google search API for programs any more. Trust me if we could we would!
Somebody needs to beat some sense into Google I guess.
I've removed the keep_on_top flag in Subversion which should help.
Thanks.
Rahul
On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 02:40 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Colin Walters wrote:
Keep in mind that the big board is intended to be part of the larger online desktop mode, and I think Mugshot fits pretty well for someone who mostly uses online apps.
I am thinking that if we are going to have big board by default on F8 the user experience should be better than or atleast comparable to what we have already.
The current thinking is that we are going to have an "online desktop" mode and some way to switch between the online and traditional desktop modes. Realistically, bigboard and the whole online desktop will still be a bit experimental by the time F8 comes around.
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Colin Walters wrote:
Keep in mind that the big board is intended to be part of the larger online desktop mode, and I think Mugshot fits pretty well for someone who mostly uses online apps.
I am thinking that if we are going to have big board by default on F8 the user experience should be better than or atleast comparable to what we have already.
it can be installed by default but not _enabled_ having a desktop that requires a net connection as default is a a very bad idea (and wrong too).
On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 13:35 +0200, dragoran wrote:
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Colin Walters wrote:
Keep in mind that the big board is intended to be part of the larger online desktop mode, and I think Mugshot fits pretty well for someone who mostly uses online apps.
I am thinking that if we are going to have big board by default on F8 the user experience should be better than or atleast comparable to what we have already.
it can be installed by default but not _enabled_ having a desktop that requires a net connection as default is a a very bad idea (and wrong too).
Online desktop will likely be a "spin" or something like that. I think it makes sense to continue having the developer/server/traditional desktop version of Fedora too. There will likely be cross pollination between them.
As for the net connection, online desktop is targeted towards people for whom their computer is already basically a brick without at least a semi-reliable internet connection. Personally, if I couldn't get to gmail, wikipedia, online python docs, really just the web in general for an extended period of time about all I can do is code on stuff I already have installed and docs for, which is a pretty specific task.
Online desktop isn't going to require an 100%-reliable connection as realistically it doesn't exist. In other words, things don't just fail if you don't happen to be connected that second. But the world is clearly moving towards internet mostly everywhere, in the form of wimax/mobile phone network/citywide wifi, and it makes sense to design for it.
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