Hey all, I want to finally write something I've meant to write for a long time.
First off, here is some context, in the form of recent events: Sense Hofstede mentions that NotifyOSD has barely been touched in the latest Ubuntu iterations: http://twitter.com/qense/status/14779713532 Matthew Paul Thomas expresses dissatisfaction with the current shape of NotifyOSD: https://twitter.com/mpt/statuses/15525108146 https://twitter.com/mpt/statuses/15564045224 https://twitter.com/conscioususer/statuses/15564426984 https://twitter.com/mpt/statuses/15584217252 Benjamin Humphrey posts a long essay about the current unpolished elements in Ubuntu. I don't agree with the entire post, but I do agree with its essence: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/06/many-hands-make-light-work-few-make-it.html David Siegel, in a comment to this posts, explicitly says: "A good first step would be to decide not to ship features if they're not finished yet!" It seems that ever since Ayatana started giving fruit, new ideas have been proposed and started faster than old ideas are being polished enough. Perhaps "polished" is not even the word, is at implies improvement over something already complete. And some things are not yet complete. For example, NotifyOSD, which IIRC was the first ever Ayatana implementation to land, is still not fully following its specification. For example, the morphing windows/alerts do not exist yet, and they would be helpful in improving the current update-manager behavior (one of the hottest bugs ever). Dynamic timeouts based on text length do not exist yet, as well. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/332945 Another example is the Me Menu, which created a lot of confusion with respect to what the text field was supposed to do, confusion that might not exist that the specification, which included microblogging icons, was being fully followed. I don't think that there is a single Ayatana project which already reached a stated we can call close to "finished". To make things worse, the user is expected to figure out those incomplete implementations by himself. The Manual Project was an improvement in this regard, but that still doesn't change the fact that the new user is being faced with incomplete implementations that might be very intuitive in the future but currently are not. When I suggested some kind of "getting started" tutorial, to complement the install slideshow, I was shot down in this list (twice) with the argument that "it's better if the features are intuitive and speak for themselves". Well, while the implementation is incomplete, that won't happen. What should be done meanwhile? Meanwhile, Maverick is proposing Window Indicators, which will require a lot of technical work and upstream collaboration. And probably will take a lot of time from the few people who are responsible for the majority of NotifyOSD/indicator coding. Time that, perhaps, could be better spent in fulfilling popular requests. My question is: isn't it time to put some brakes on the enthusiasm and start prioritizing polishing instead of new features? The current approach is not scalable, and this is starting to show... _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
