unity-design team mailing list archive

[Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:54:06 -0400 Martin Owens <doctormo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Hey Scott,
>
>I'm not sure I can agree with the following:
>
>On Sat, 2009-09-05 at 13:19 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> To be clear, Ayatana is not part of Ubuntu.  I think it's new for
>> Canonical 
>> to have a team dedicated to upstream development and user experience 
>> improvements.
>
>That's not that clear at all. Are you saying that "Ayatana is not a part
>of Ubuntu the...":
>
>a) Operating System Distribution,
>b) Philosophy of Human Behaviour,
>c) Super community as managed by the Ubuntu Community Council,
>d) Community project of employed and non-employed packagers,
>e) Community of users and advocates,
>f) Sub-project of Canonical the company for service products,
>g) The grand idea of delivering software that human beings can use and
>appreciate.
>or
>h) All of the above
>
>Because if it's all of the above, then it most certainly does include
>Ayatana. I tend to think it's as much a project of collaboration and
>idea sharing with the community as it is a canonical design team
>imparting designs of wisdom on the upstream projects.

I was thinking A off your list.  To Ubuntu the distro it is another 
upstream that happens to be sponsored by Canonical (similarly Launchpad is 
not part of the Ubuntu distro either even though Ubuntu uses Launchpad, 
Launchpad uses Ubuntu, and they have a common sponsor).

>> I think questions from other upstream usability experts deserve
>> particular 
>> attention.  If there are conceptual or design shortcomings, the sooner
>> they 
>> are exposed, the better.
>
>I did user interface design at college and even I don't think that
>upstreams are that inept at user interfaces. I tend to want to see
>ayatana as presenting the case for community design needs which most
>upstreams don't have as their primary focus.
>
>After all, most volunteer open source programmers are serving their own
>needs first and shouldn't really be serving others unless they have a
>serious altruistic bent in their core principles by design (like Ubuntu
>the community) or are being paid by the end users.

I know people say this often, but that hasn't been my general experience.

>It does read to me a little bit like "Those dumb upstreams need all the
>skilled help they can get" which I don't think is true when you consider
>primary reasons for free and open source projects compared to the
>primary reasons for Ubuntu.
>
>Thoughts?

I tend to think rather well of developers and their willingness to do right by their users.  
The designer centered approach is what I understand to be Ayatana's philosophy, so my comment 
is based on my understanding of their preferred approach.

Scott K