Dear community, at the last GRCon we discussed the user experience regarding GNU Radio. A pretty huge group of people came together for a very productive discussion on how the user experience can be improved.
Our method of choice was to go through the "life cycle" of a GNU Radio developer, starting at the first time they enter gnuradio.org, through installation issues and the first time they start using GNU Radio. We clearly did not have enough time, which is why I would like to invite the mailing list to continue the discussion in this thread. But first, let me recap the results from the GRCon working group. I will give an overview here; for the details, head over to the new wiki page at http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/GRCon13Community Web Site ======== Clearly, the web site is extremely important. We need to make sure we make a good first impression, but then also provide a useful page for everyone. Even within our group, we had nearly as many opinions as there were people. A lot of us agreed the start page has too much content, but as to what is relevant and what can go to sub-pages, there was no consensus. Installation ============ In the future, we want to steer novice users clear from source installs, and recommend using binary installs where sensible. As soon as 3.7 releases hit the major distros, this will be very easy for most users. Since for a long time, source installs were really the only viable option (which gave cause for tools such as build_gnuradio), people have been getting used to this even though for many cases, source installs are really not a requirement. Of course, at some stage, they are necessary, but we want to make sure people only do source installs when they actually hit this stage. We definitely need to harden pybombs and get the word out to use that. However, pybombs needs to be installed through a git checkout, which is not much more difficult than doing a GR source install. We're not quite sure how to fix this. Something we never considered is that people might actually be after one of the many great OOT-modules (e.g. gr-ais), and simply consider GNU Radio a dependency. This should be reflected in the install page. Examples ======== As with most projects, examples are one of the most important elements when learning GNU Radio. Unfortunately, we sometimes don't treat our examples very well. Sometimes, they don't even work, but in any case, there could be more examples available. This is something new users can do: Create good examples, and test the old ones. We currently don't have automated QA mechanisms for our examples, so we need real humans to have a look at them for us. There was an idea to integrate the examples into GRC, such that we add a drop down menu which accesses all the installed examples. GRC has received a very long wishlist though, so don't expect to see this any time soon (or perhaps add it yourself :). Beginners who are trying to learn GNU Radio through examples should not be shy to complain about non-working examples, but rather treat them like any other bug. This is actually a very nice way to become a contributor, by filing tickets against broken examples, fixing them or adding new ones. Tutorials ========= Of course, tutorials are also a major component when learning a tool such as GNU Radio. It was agreed that there are not enough entry-level tutorials, which also should be accompanied with GRC files. Luckily, we found some volunteers to work on this. GNU Radio Companion =================== An entire sub-working group was created to discuss development on GRC. There are a lot of expectations towards GRC; fortunately, there are also a lot of volunteers to help improve it. A separate wiki page was created to coordinate dev on the companion: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/GRCroadmap News ==== A surprisingly easy wish was to have more output on the newsletter than release notes. We'll try our best! OK, those were the topics discussed at GRCon13. As I said, feel free to comment or discuss! Martin -- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Communications Engineering Lab (CEL) Dipl.-Ing. Martin Braun Research Associate Kaiserstraße 12 Building 05.01 76131 Karlsruhe Phone: +49 721 608-43790 Fax: +49 721 608-46071 www.cel.kit.edu KIT -- University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association
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