ubiquity-slideshow team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 23:15 -0400, H S wrote:
> I kept tinkering around, and have a couple of new slideshow mockups
> and a grand idea.
> 
> Instead of using all that space on the Ubuntu LiveCD to build WebKit
> into the Ubiquity installer, just to have a slideshow, why not just
> build an old-fashioned image slideshow, using .jpeg slides?  That way,
> even if the slides themselves take up more memory, the whole slideshow
> would certainly take up much less memory just by ditching WebKit.
> Going this route, would also mean we could design really nice looking
> slides, and focus on visual appeal, and conveying simple, easy to
> understand messages.  Just a thought.  Anyhow, please take a look at
> my latest slide mockups, and let me know what you think:
> http://ubuntuwtf.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/some-more-slideshow-mockups/
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Howard "Freeman" Stellar.

That looks cool.
I should point out that I'm using Webkit entirely because it will
probably be on the live cd by default; GNOME is bringing it in pretty
strongly as an external dependency. If this turns out not to be the
case, it'll be Firefox's xulrunner or a hand-made XML parser.

I love the way you have the bubbles here. Very tidy. Light on text,
heavy on image is a decent idea to pursue so long as the image conveys
the right information to replace the text. In your example I don't think
that is so much the case; for information about support resources, it
sure does a lot of promoting GNOME Do. (I guess we could call that a
dual purpose, but then the reader forgets support having been blinded by
GNOME Do's brilliance).
Of course, that's an example. I can certainly imagine where that would
work really well.

One issue with using big images alone is localization. Text gets lost in
there, so either we abandon translations or use boatloads of space to
support them. I just got the first nail into the translation (and build:
<https://launchpad.net/~ubiquity-slideshow/+archive/ppa>) infrastructure
for the HTML  version, meanwhile, to sort of get that moving. Nice thing
with it is people just work through Launchpad's Rosetta (the
Translations section), submit new strings and are done. (Err, don't all
jump on it at once, though; strings are certainly not frozen and .pot
files are not right).

If you have some ideas to that end it would be swell. Stripping text /
localization details from screenshots and handling the captions with
text could be one way about that, but I can't really picture how it
would look...


This particular idea may be well suited to a kind of promotional web
site, too, where localization isn't so much of an expectation and where
disk space doesn't impact the end user.



Take care,

Dylan

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