launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Martin Pilkington <pilky@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Just to respond to a few points:
>
> On 20 Dec 2009, at 10:33 pm, Jonathan Lange wrote:
>> As Michael says, the Launchpad API was intended to enable experiments
>> like these. However, were I you, I would be seriously considering
>> working to improve the existing UI, rather than creating my own.
>>
>> Changing the UI of Launchpad.net might be a little harder and a less
>> fun than writing a new application, but it does give you an instant,
>> large user-base and a sizable body of developers. It also means that
>> whatever improvements you make are shared with the entire Launchpad
>> community.
>
> This is part of the reason I did the mockups of improving things a bit in the current UI. However, what I'm hoping to achieve is something that is radically different. Personally if I was to go further with my mockups I'd probably want to remove 50% of the stuff on each page. Obviously that wouldn't go down too well, which is why I'm wanting to do this in a separate UI, that allows me to experiment with a much simpler, but (if done right) no less powerful UI.

You say "obviously", but it might go down better than you think.

> On 20 Dec 2009, at 11:28 pm, Ian Clatworthy wrote:
>> I'm also planning to experiment over xmas with making Bazaar Explorer a
>> better "LP desktop client". The integration with LP code hosting and
>> merge proposals is pretty nice now[1] but there's plenty of scope for
>> making the workflow even smoother IMO.
>>
>> My focus will be on adding value over the current feature set rather
>> than on porting browser-based functionality to a desktop app. For
>> example, I'd like to make it easy for users to create "assistants" or
>> "dashboards" so they can see at a glance (and action) stuff like:
>>
>> * unanswered questions
>> * new bugs
>> * merge proposals
>>
>> for a batch of projects they care about. I'd like these to be soft-coded
>> in an xml file so others can build whatever assistants/dashboards
>> interest them. launchpadlib will be key to providing this magic.
>>
>> If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd love to hear/see your
>> thoughts on useful assistants/dashboards, particuarly for new users.
>
> These sound like a very interesting idea. I feel that these items are far more useful to launchpad users than what is currently visible. And the ability to build your own would help provide a custom data view for launchpad so you can optimise for each project. I think that you should maybe provide the ability to create a "class" of dashboards. For example, if you set yourself as being in the project leader "class" you will probably want a different set of dashboards to if you're just in an occasional contributor "class". So as well as letting users build their own, there are a series of pre-built dashboards sets and they can choose which set they want by saying how much of a contribution they want to make to a project. This really solves one of the key issues I have with LaunchPad's UI, which is that it can show a lot of irrelevant information in certain use cases.

FWIW, we'd love to have a more dashboard-oriented view for almost
every part of Launchpad. I think we could improve a great deal without
providing the level of configurability that you & Ian are talking
about.

jml