Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Had a really fun night with Krissa last night after she got off work. We first went to the MFA and saw all the pretty cars. Pictures soon. After that, we hit Betty’s for dinner. Plaintain wontons. Yummy. Wrapped up the evening with The Incredibles, which was a lot of fun. All in all, a very nice, relaxed, very-far-from-the-computer evening.

Shame to see Alan Nugent is leaving Novell. He seemed like a good, clueful guy. I wish him luck.

Spolsky gave a talk in design, aka ‘superficiality’, at etch- sounds like it was fun.

<lewing> anyway I would say luis’ rant could easily be rewritten as “why is it so fucking hard to do things ‘properly’ in gtk+”
<lewing> because if you backed up his examples with actual code samples you would see that in almost every case he shows it takes extra steps to do the right thing
<lewing> anyway I think this could be an opportunity for us to learn stuff instead of just blaming adobe

Fair comment. I am at this point so divorced from actual coding, and so used to seeing the work of experts, that my standards may be unreasonable, or my finger my point in not quite the right direction. For whatever reason, it isn’t very good, and perhaps someone with contacts at Adobe could sit down with them and do a post-mortem- if a lot of it is ‘our’ fault then we should fix it, for all the ISVs we keep hoping will be coming.

Spent most of the day poking at my paper; Krissa read it last night and had lots of useful comments, so I did quite a bit of rewriting. Joe helpfully pointed out that I could use some lessons from the Economist style guide. :)

Found this piece on the media, and the value of information, interesting. Basic point is that information providers are caught in a really bad spot of the supply-demand curve- there is so much of it right now that it is hard to make a big profit. He thinks music publishers are going to become like book publishers- 20-30K runs will be considered a success, instead of the current need for something to sell 250K copies before it breaks even.

Apparently Adobe Acrobat 7 is out. I wrote this review about the beta; not much has changed, so I thought I’d post it here as well. I wouldn’t normally care all that much about proprietary software, but when I first heard that Adobe was porting to gtk, I was pretty excited- I hoped/assumed that they’d Get It and make an actual gnome-y app. That didn’t happen. I realize there are economic realities about our platform that make that difficult, but some of the options they’ve chosen are… very odd at best, even taking that into account.

So, anyway- I do applaud Adobe for taking a plunge that many other proprietary software makers have been unwilling to take. But I hope that their next step is to become a real, native-looking Linux app, and not just a lukewarm port.

Summary:

The Acrobat reader beta has a lot of problems. It uses custom widgets where standard gtk widgets are available, causing issues with integration, theming, and accessibility. It does not take advantage of long-available bits like CUPS and gconf, causing usability and manageability problems. Finally, it does not follow modern (i.e., since 2002) GNOME design standards, making it a less integrated part of the desktop.

Technology choices:

All of these techs except the last are available, I believe, on all the distros Adobe wants to support.

* still uses ‘/usr/bin/lp’ for printing. C’mon. It is 2005.

In the gnome screenshot, note the presence of the ‘HP-4100′ printer in the printer list; the adobe reader is forced to confront and understand the mysterious string ‘/usr/bin/lp’.

* It should use gconf to store and read preferences so that it can be remotely configured and managed by tools designed to read and write gconf keys, like the current tools from Sun and the forthcoming tools from Novell and Red Hat.

* Appears to use gtk 2.2 instead of gtk 2.4 or 2.6, each of which would allow access to the newer, improved file selector, and improved toolbar and menu APIs.

Design issues:

* generally speaking, the beta does not attempt to follow modern GNOME standards for dialog layout. The UI design of the app should seek to follow the GNOME Human Interfaces Guideline (HIG). Compare and contrast the use of indentation, spacing, bold text, and lines suggested by the HIG:

with the file->print menu above, or the preferences menu below. This is a problem in effectively every dialog in the application. If you’re going to port to Linux, port to look like modern GNOME or KDE apps- not GNOME 1.4. Please. :)

* In buttons, there is frequent use of ‘Cancel’ and ‘OK’, where GNOME standards would prefer more descriptive terms- for example, in the print dialog, ‘OK’ is replaced by the more informative ‘Print’ in the GNOME dialog. One is a lot easier and clearer, regardless of whether you use GNOME, KDE, or Windowmaker; one is not.

Custom widgets:

* The main toolbar is not a GTK toolbar, and so does not respect GNOME/gtk theming. This has two significant implications: it does not respect accessibility theming, nor does it look/feel like a ‘native’ application, which I’d originally thought was a goal for them.

In the acrobat screenshot, note the difference in background color between the toolbar and menu (an accessibility problem), and note the different icons (a cosmetic and accessibility problem). [I assume they've tried to understand the a11y problems, as they have a number of accessibility menus and are probably working around a lot of these with their own settings.]

* in many cases standard gtk widgets are simply not used; see, for example:

Note the very primitive looking for a checked box in the acrobat example, and the more modern and professional-looking checkboxes in the gedit/gnome example. There are others: there is a custom checkbox widget, and a custom dropdown list widget. Besides looking out of place and not being properly themeable, there are almost certainly accessibility implications for doing custom widgets.

Big picture design choices:

* It is a pdf viewer. With built in web searching. WTF. Compare and contrast Evince.

* It has MDI. Not just tabs, but true, old-school, MDI. Why does a pdf viewer (or anything) have a multi-document interface (MDI) instead of per-document windows? MDI was the way to go in Windows 3.1, and has (for good reasons) fallen out of favor since then. I should get one window per document as I do virtually everywhere else in any Linux desktop, be it GNOME, KDE, or even OOo (which managed to grok this was a bad idea by, like, 2001). Worst-case scenario, the interface should be tabbed (as in firefox and gedit) and not MDI.

I just finished reading this very interesting paper for my class. It’s 46 pages, pretty long, but a fascinating read, at least for me. The core contention is that the best form of ‘government’ (i.e., rule-making) for the net is basically collaborative filtering based on ID. So, for example, you could only accept emails from people who know people you know (orkut-style), or only install software from companies who you or your ISP or OS vendor trust, or only let your kids see web pages vetted by your friends who are also parents. The paper is light on how this would work in practice (probably a good thing ;), but goes into a fair amount of detail about why at least in principle the idea is better than the other rule-making options, like democracy, anarchy, or benign dictatorship. I found it all pretty interesting- certainly the kind of thinking I’d like to see more of, instead of falling back to the Same Old Cliches about how the internet wants to be free or how what the internet needs is more laws.

Good weekend- Duke won the ACC tourney and a couple friends came over to watch- always good to have company for these things. And I was uber-productive this morning- got out of my apartment and pounded out my paper for class tomorrow. Krissa edited it tonight, and so I have reasonable expectations that it won’t suck by the time it is due tomorrow night.

Have had 7K liveCD downloads from the torrent so far, and a couple indicators of interest in custom versions. Yay. :)

hehe:

In the spirit of feeling entitled to the direction of the efforts of others without compensation, merely because their prominence suggests an implicit responsibility to mob rule, I suggest that “market research” be conducted to decide what Eugenia should be required to do about one of her own usability problems: her contemptible personality. I suggest that Eugenia’s future conduct be decidied by a poll that can be advertised on Slashdot and OSNews, and I will even generously volunteer to construct and setup the polling software necessary to decide her future endeavors. It is the least she can do after all of the effort that her readers go through to finish even the smallest of her epic forays into the realm of writing, and if she cannot meet this responsibility, then I for one think she should step aside and permit someone else to take up the reins.

Glad to see that others responded clearly, forcefully, and well to eugenia, so that I don’t have to ;)

We’ve had 4500 downloads of the liveCD from the bittorrent. It’s no Fedora Core ;) but it’s a nice base for stuff. Remember: if you are running a conference, or giving a talk, or whatever, and GNOME is involved and you’ve thought about a liveCD, drop me or marketing-list an email. The liveCD is very flexible, and I want to make it very customizable for anyone with any needs.

I spent a big chunk of this morning slicing the 3.0 page on the wiki into ‘things that would require massive revamping’ and ‘things that belong are really 2.x issues.’ Hopefully that will make actual 3.0 discussion a little easier. I also added notes from a couple folks on their visions on 3.0.

Party last night was good, relaxed as usual. Neat to see Ian’s roadster, and good to see some of the old crowd. Have been 2500 bittorrent downloads of the liveCD, and more from the ftp mirrors, so I think we done good. Of course, that just leads into discussions of what next… hopefully I started the process today of reaching out to the monoppix folks, and clarifying some stuff in the wiki about languages. gnome-nl, call me… we need to talk :)

Have settled in today to mostly just watch basketball ;) But I need to work on my paper too, unfortunately.

Conference notes:

• GUADEC and GNOME Summit 2005 are coming up; if you need visas to GNOME Summit, you probably want to start now.
• The folks behind OLS are putting together desktopcon and calling for papers- should be an interesting time, submit your papers now :)

Am heading off to collapse now, after sleeping for like three hours, punctuated by an alarm every hour to wake up and check on the upload of the liveCD. But it is done, anyway. Thanks to everyone who helped make 2.10 rock and particularly (on the liveCD) to:

• Ian, Steven, and everyone else at the Summit Marketing BOF who helped crystallize the rationale and helped push me to make it a reality.
• Everyone who helped with content on the liveCD, particularly Stuart Ellis for helping out a lot with the docs.
• Hermanitos Verdes for CD art, with an assist from Tim Gerla on the background.
• Seth Vidal for helping with the torrent very early this morning, and the usual suspects for mirroring.
• The various ubuntu guys who helped get me up to speed on building the liveCD, and did lots of packaging :)
• I’m sure others who I am forgetting right now in my rush to sleep.

P.S. I miss release names… I’ll have to start doing them for the liveCD :)

Prescript, added later: I want to emphasize that this isn’t about dumping on the Abi guys, Marc, Alan, Dom, Martin, etc.- IMNSHO, they make the best word processor on my platform right now, and they appear to be doing great work to extend it and add features that are pretty cool and darn useful (like the grammar checking mentioned below, and the very useful image wrapping.) I’m just lobbying for them to take a step back and think big picture before taking their next big steps, much as Alan is doing, just with a totally different focus ;)

Marc:Grammar checking isn’t feature creep ;) Really, the focus is not whether or not Abi is getting bloated- it is about how you take the features you have (or may add, like the cool image wrapping stuff, or potential features to make it a better simple text editor) and present them to the user. Even the stock toolbar (I’ve updated the link) has a lot of stuff that is useless most of the time, and doesn’t reflect thinking about how users actually use the features that they request. This is what is great about Pages, and about Apple in general- they write applications that reflect what people actually do, not what they say they want to do when writing feature checklists. That’s why we had grip for ages (‘we’ beat apple to the basic idea of a ripping/DB tool) but they got iTunes- same core functionalities, but one is considered to be the standard against which everything else is judged and the other gives you an entire tab for what options to pass to the encoder.

As another example, users say they want buttons for bold, and italic, and what have you, but what they really want, 99.9% of the time, is formatting for different text types:

Compare that one dropdown to six entries in my stock abi and ooo toolbars. [OOo at least has such a dropdown, but as is typical, it is suboptimal, not actually showing you what you're selecting.] Which actually gets at what the user needs to do to produce a decent looking document? Do they want to remember what font and size they used for every other header? Or do they just want to select ‘header’, change the font/size once, and move on with actually writing headers? Adding such a menu to Abi and nuking most of the text formatting options from the default toolbar wouldn’t necessarily reduce the feature count (all those things could still be there), but it might (along with other similar changes) radically simplify how people use Abi, and make them happier users.

I don’t think OOo can turn into a tool that actually answers user needs like Pages appears to- even adding single, stable, uncontroversial features is a killer (as all of you involved in the wordperfect stuff have noted) so I can’t imagine a radical change in philosophy being at all realistic (though I’d love to be proven wrong.) Abi is a small, active community, with a smaller, nimbler codebase- so it can think about this kind of radical rethink of options and features.

As an aside, this is deeply related to what irritates me about the thread currently raging on desktop-devel (and, as usual, killing usefulness for actual developers): the assumption that polls can somehow tell you want users want. If we’d polled users around gnome 2.0, we’d still be chasing KDE down the ‘more options! more options!’ route, instead of actually focusing on things that are easy to use and functional. Now, actual market and user research done the right way can be useful- I’m intrigued to see that Alan is doing something along those lines, such a thing has been proposed on the marketing list, and Novell certainly has mulled serious user testing (as opposed to polling.) I’d love to discuss that. But instead we’re just encouraging more people to unsubscribe from d-d-l. Blah.

Postcript:Alan: I don’t think that, in the end, ‘Desktop Publishing’ is all that much different from what most people really need in a word processor- they have a handful of formats they typically use, and they want to crank out content in those formats quickly, repeatably, and easily, focusing on the content mostly, and having the machine take care of formatting as much as possible. That’s not really all that different from ‘Desktop Publishing’, is it?

Alan: the text world is not merely a straight line along the axis between notepad and word. If Abi really wants to grab a larger market, the target should be Pages. Compare:

with

I love abi, and prefer it to OOo, but it can still get a lot better as a word processor by getting off the feature treadmill and thinking hard about what targets it is chasing.

It is quite awesome to watch the 2.10 tarballs roll in. Go us!

Besides that, a pretty good weekend- saw Iron Giant on Friday night (sappy but fun), went to see my aunt on Saturday, and lots of great basketball on Sunday (despite losing to the boys in wimpy blue, in a great game. We’ll get you tonight and this weekend, Todd.)

Hopefully I’ll have the outline of my paper for class done tonight and I can focus on getting the 2.10 liveCD together- I’ve built a test build already, but need to clean it up more before the release, and I’m running out of time.

I’ve contributed to ffii today (since I don’t have an MEP to write/call) and I hope other Americans will as well.