On 03/11/2012 07:14 PM, Evan Huus wrote:
On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:13 PM, Ken VanDine <ken.vand...@ubuntu.com
<mailto:ken.vand...@ubuntu.com>> wrote:
First thing is to remember the reasoning behind including gwibber in
Ubuntu wasn't to provide a twitter client, it was for social
networking
integration in the desktop. Provide an easy way to share information
with your friends and see what your friends are up to. This doesn't
mean the gwibber client user interface providing you a stream of your
friends activity, but real application integration. Like a simple way
to post to all your accounts from the former MeMenu or to share user
reviews in software center. Software Center is a great example of why
Gwibber was included, after you write a review you can choose to share
your review from right there inside the software center interface.
Sure
applications can implement the functionality themselves, but that
would
require quite a bit of effort. To use libgwibber to post, it really
only takes a few lines of code. And this type of desktop integration
really can't be done with the browser.
That's cool, and I didn't know you could do that. If we want to go in
that direction though (which I think we do), then we need to do much
more to make Gwibber discoverable. Right now it's hidden either in the
messaging menu (under the not-necessarily-friendly name 'broadcast')
or in the dash where the user has to explicitly search for it.
One possible way to do this would be to add something to ubufox that
would prompt whenever a user logs in to facebook, twitter etc (with
the same style prompt as the 'remember this password'). Someone
sitting down in front of Ubuntu who wants to access facebook will just
go to facebook in firefox and log in. If we then let them know they
can use Gwibber for that and get all sorts of cool integration, I
expect usage (and thus, slowly, contributions) would go way up.
I would really like to see Gwibber get "fixed" as opposed to dropping
it. Not because I am now the maintainer, but to continue with the
original spirit of why it was included. If nobody cared to fix
Gwibber
I would have no problem spending my time working on other projects, I
took on Gwibber because the previous maintainer stepped down and I
had a
vested interest because of Ubuntu.
The real problem we have with Gwibber is lack of contributors, we only
have a few regular contributors all with other responsibilities.
Fortunately I get to do some work on Gwibber as part of my day job
working for Canonical, which is awesome. However, most of the work I
put into gwibber is in my spare time. None of the complaints I've
seen
from people are unsolvable, but we need to have a plan and people to
work on it.
To get people interested in fixing it, we need to get people
interested in using it. I haven't historically used it, but only
because I thought it wasn't useful - I had no idea it had all this
potential for integration into other parts of the desktop.
1. More Discoverable
2. More Users
3. More Contributers
4. Profit!
My proposed solution: Put together a plan of what needs to be
done and
do a call for volunteers to help work on it. I do think we can find
some people with enough interest to do their part. This is much more
constructive than just saying we need to drop it.
For those that haven't tried the latest version, I really suggest
getting 3.3.91 and taking that for a spin. Most of the effort
we've put
into it recently have been quality, so no stunning changes but more
reliability. Duplicate detection and handling of the content.
Scrolling and keyboard navigation has improved quite a bit, but we
really need smooth scrolling. I would say that would be at the top of
the todo list.
I know I'm interested. I have coding experience, but I don't have a
lot of spare time. Still, I'll branch the bzr repo and poke around. A
to-do list (especially with some bitesize bugs for new contributors)
would be awesome.
Cheers,
Evan
I think some of the things I personally would like to see in order for
it to be a client I would use is:
* Performance Improvements (Gwibber seems very laggy)
* GUI Improvements (I would love the ability to have columns much like
TweetDeck/Hootsuite and other popular social clients)
* Bit.ly Integration and TwitPic capability?
I could like contribute to bitesizes and will start keeping a closer eye
on bugs related to Gwibber but I'm not sure that I would be able to
contribute any major improvements. Perhaps we could discuss the "State
of Gwibber" at UDS-Q and find some ways to get more contributors engaged
in its development?
--
Benjamin Kerensa "I am what I am because
Team Lead, Ubuntu Oregon of who we all are." - Ubuntu
bkere...@ubuntu.com
http://ubuntu-oregon.org
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