unity-design team mailing list archive

["Scott Kitterman" <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Allan Caeg <allancaeg@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 9:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [Ayatana] Ubuntu User Experience Guidelines
> To: Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
(top posting fixed)
> On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 11:33 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:59:57 +0800 Allan Caeg <allancaeg@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >Borrowing heavily from the format and content of Google's UX principles
>> >( http://www.google.com/corporate/ux.html ), below is my proposed draft
>> >of the Ubuntu UX Guidelines. Before reading it, please keep in mind
>> that
>> >this (very) rough draft is based exclusively on my experiences with
>> >Ubuntu (the OS), and the community so I am encouraging everyone to
>> >contribute what is fit.
>> ...
>>
>> My immediate comment is that it would be better to focus an Ayatana UX
>> manifesto at the Ubuntu the project level.  They are already working in
>> Kubuntu as well as Ubuntu (the OS).
>>
>> Scott K
>
>
> Sir, you mean, have a specific Ayatana UX manifesto that is clearly for
> Ubuntu (the GNOME desktop) alone and another one for Kubuntu? If I
> understand you correctly, I agree. The reason why I pointed out the
> GNOME HIG is because of *some* differences between the goals of the
> desktop environments

I meant rather the opposite.  I think that eventually, that would be
appropriate, but that first take a step back and look at the higher level
abstractions that apply across the Ubuntu project and then drill down to
desktop environment specifics.  As I understand it, Ayatana is not meant
to just be fore Ubuntu, but to help improve the entire free desktop
ecosphere.  If you focus too soon on one desktop for one distribution, I
think that vision will be difficult to achieve.

As an example, one of the points we (I'm a Kubuntu developer) discussed
with Ayatana at the last UDS was the idea of notification consistency.  If
my chosen desktop is Gnome and I am running notify-osd, then I should get
notify-osd notifications from all applications regardless of if they
happen to be KDE or Gnome.  OTOH, if I'm using Pidgin in KDE, I should get
native looking notifications from Pidgin.

We have achieved this goal for Karmic.  After a lot of work by both KDE
and Ayatana developers, there was enough of an agreement about the f.d.o
notification spec for KDE to be able to integrate with
libnotify/notify-osd and so thanks to Ayatana (and the KDE developers that
were involved) we will have that for Karmic.  KDE applications will put
their notifications on the bus for whatever notification system is active
to listen to and KNotification will listen on the bus for notifications
from any application that puts them there.

The really nice thing about this is that the KDE patches hit KDE svn for
KDE 4.4 and the Ubuntu archive for Karmic/KDE 4.3 within 24 hours of each
other, so we benefit now and the whole free desktop world benefits next
year.

I believe that this kind of effort is something that Ayatana is pretty
uniquely positioned to work on and will ultimately elevate all of us.

So yes, we need DE specific work, but we need to work at the higher level
too.

Scott K