openstack team mailing list archive

[Jaromir Coufal <jcoufal@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey All,

I investigated and played with few tools for team collaboration, mainly 
focused on designs and discussions. They are mostly similar as 
Phabricator [1], what Monty suggested. You can see inVision [2] or 
GoVisually [3] for example. And of course there are more, however they 
are all somehow similar.

I have few notes which covers most of them (from my point of view):

* I can't help myself, but I have disorganized feeling.
    - Might be only my problem, but the whole system navigation is 
just... Strange. Maybe too much graphical :)
* Main focus on pictures.
    - You can't start a thread without picture.
    - It's just a little bit weird, if everything is focused on the 
picture, which from my point of view shouldn't be the main point. 
Pictures and other documents should be supportive material - discussion 
matters here.
    - Due on pictures focus, discussions are just somehow neglected.
* I love the inline comments for pictures, but...
     - Having possibility to attach comment to any place of the picture 
is cool, but... still this tool will fail for example in sequence of 
screens, if you are presenting workflow.
* Mainly - I don't see developers coming to this tool and actively ask & 
discuss.

Therefore, also thanks to comments from Toshi and Kyle, I tried to focus 
a little bit more on GitHub. I asked couple of colleagues and friends 
what would they prefer. From developers, the answer was obvious - 
GitHub. Designers said that they wouldn't mind GH, they are ok with it. 
Anyway, it's a normal discussion tool, nothing to be afraid of. The 
reasons why GitHub matters are already covered in my first e-mail and I 
still see it as the best possibility.

Another reason for GitHub occurred in last conversation on G+ community 
site. There started thread about design question, which got solved, but 
then followed implementation discussion how to implement such thing. And 
here you can see, that any tool focusing on designers in the first 
place, would fail.

I really don't want to discourage creative people from proposals and 
discussions - completely the opposite. I want them to connect to 
developers and vice versa.

That's why I believe that GitHub worths trying.

-- Jarda

[1] http://www.invisionapp.com/
[2] http://www.invisionapp.com/
[3] http://www.govisually.com/


On 2013/19/06 03:49, Monty Taylor wrote:
> Hey all!
>
> I spoke with Gabriel about this briefly on IRC, but there is an app for
> Phabricator called Pholio which seems to do the things the UI folks are
> looking for.
>
> To play with it further, I've spun up a phabricator here:
>
> http://phab.mnorp.com/
>
> You should have gotten account signup emails (if not, look in your spam
> folder - it's a throwaway machine)
>
> Check out:
>
> http://phab.mnorp.com/pholio/
>
> I've put up one design review here:
>
> http://phab.mnorp.com/M1
>
> that Jim and I have discussed a little bit.
>
> We're not thrilled with Phabricator for things like bug tracking or code
> review yet - but it's configurable enough that we could turn off
> everything except design review and move forward with that.
>
> Then, if we get to a point where more of its features are useful to us,
> then great - or if this winds up something we only ever use for design
> reviews - well, that's great too.
>
> David/Olaph - we'll need an OpenID SSO provider landed upstream before
> we can use this. (we are NOT going to carry local patches) There is an
> upstream auth refactor going on:
>
> https://secure.phabricator.com/T1536
>
> Also, you'll see on http://phab.mnorp.com/M1 a lorem ipsum over to the
> side. We should finish that work. Then we'll need to do a proper puppet
> install and skinning.
>
> Don't anybody do work yet - mainly I want to see if this is suitable for
> the UI folks, and if we as the infra folks feel comfortable running one
> for pholio, and whether or not the potential slippery slope of possibly
> using more functions is something we'd be ok with in the future.
>
> Thanks for checking this out guys!
>
> Other things to look at if you get bored:
>
> I made an issue:
> http://phab.mnorp.com/T1
> There is a calendar:
> http://phab.mnorp.com/calendar/
> There is a not-terrible code browser:
> http://phab.mnorp.com/diffusion/
> http://phab.mnorp.com/diffusion/HORIZON/
>
> I particularly like blame being available:
> http://phab.mnorp.com/diffusion/HORIZON/browse/master/README.rst?view=blame
>
> And it's got github-like highlight:
>
> http://phab.mnorp.com/diffusion/HORIZON/browse/master/README.rst;f66e2730fd8f94a4$15-23