Máirín's Sketches and Ponderings

i'm closing up shop here.

livejournal seems to have an uncertain future. wordpress is open source, has a nicer ui, and seems to have a more certain future. so i've migrated over there:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/

Due to a bit of a mixup, if you've sent me an email to my @fpo or @linuxgrrl.com address in the past day or so I haven't gotten it since my mail host wasn't available. Hopefully I'll get it in the next few hours if the messages are attempted to be sent again, but in either case if you're waiting on me for something just know I might not have gotten the message. :)

This week I've been cranking out mockups for the Fedora Community Project (read the recent fedora-announce-list announcement, or view the Moksha presentation given earlier this month at FUDcon 11).



The mockups I've been working on this week have focused around the metadata and tabs surrounding one particular package. I used nautilus as an example in the mockups. What I would love to hear from you is if you have any particular wants/desires/needs around getting information or discovering things about a particular package that you maintain. I would really appreciate if you had the time to look over these mockups (currently there are five) and let me know if they seem like they would be useful to you, or if they have any useless information on them, or if you think there is anything missing or not quite right about them:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MyFedora/Mockups#Package_Details

Also, if you haven't gotten a chance to yet and have the time/inclination, I would love to hear your feedback on any or all of the full set of Fedora Community mockups.

Peace! :)

Show me your desktop. What wallpaper are you using right now?

Sextant by mcost on Flickr, CC-BY 2.0


Greek Trireme from the U.S. Air Force Air War College, Public Domain

We're just ramping up on the Fedora 11 artwork process. You may be familiar with our previous 3-rounds process, where artists would come up with different ideas and 'compete', and by the end the last theme standing became the theme.

We're doing things a little differently this time. Since the competition results in dividing artists' efforts and focus, we've decided this time to try to work on one theme idea together, and have everyone focused on the same idea to hopefully create a higher-quality theme faster. For F11, we decided to create artwork inspired by the F11 codename, which is Leonidas. We'll see how it goes and depending on how difficult or useful this proves to be, we may or may not continue this for F12.

Either way, we have a tight deadline for the F11 artwork: 1 February 2009 to make a final decision on the visual concept for the artwork. We have a lot of ideas floating around now based on the idea of Leonidas:

• Golden ratio


• Nautilus


• Hellenic Age


• Nautical Equipment


• Maps


• Trireme (Greek Boat)


• Parthenon


• Mathematical Formulas

If you've got any cool ideas on how we can visually represent Leonidas for F11's artwork, please join the conversation on fedora-art-list.

I forgot to post my pictures of the FUDcon shirts. They came out great. Andreas gave us the idea of having a tag cloud to illustrate the shirt, and Charlie Brej wrote us a tool to generate the tag clouds from the FUDcon and Fedora logos.

Also, because of popular demand, they are black instead of white!




(modeled by Ray Strode!)

One thing I learned producing these shirts is that two layers of ink are used on black t-shirts like this, so there are two layers of white, and a layer of white underneath the blue. Good to know, I suppose, since it affects the price.

It seems like folks had a great time at Flattop Johnny's. As you can see above, we had some great ideas for Fedora sticker photo poses. :)

Pool was played:



Moonwalking too:


Word!:


And of course, there were drinks...:




Some people had *TOO* good a time. I guess not everyone can hold their Fedora:

Organizing the Schedule for the Day:

Portraits for the Fedora Book:

All the various sets for FUDcon I'm storing here in this collection: FUDCon Boston Jan 2009

I'll update as I can throughout the day.

Sometimes it happens via dialog, sometimes it happens via notification bubble, but either way my computer can be quite chatty.

I'm wondering if there are any guidelines for designing programs to be good citizens in their chattiness. Some questions that I have that maybe could be used to come up with a set of guidelines if there aren't any:

• Classify the message you're sending out. Is it a critical message, a warning, or simple information? Is it hardware-related, security-related, long-running task related (task failed or task succeeded), do I need to take any action from it or is it not possible to take action from it?


• What should the user do to address the issue, if there is any action to be taken? Can you allow the user to say, "always treat this type of action this way without bugging me?"


• For each message classification, what is the most appropriate iconography needed for the message? Is there any special wording needed? Should it be displayed on a frequent basis? What basis? Or should it be displayed just once?


• Allow users to 'unsubscribe' from particular types of notification. But perhaps don't make it all or none (although I may want to opt-out of all messages from a particular app, I should be able to turn it off at a more fine-grained level.) In each alert dialog/notification bubble, allow users to one-click visit the notification preferences for that (or all?) applications so they can quiet it. Also, should there be both 'shut up now' and 'shut up forever' buttons? If not which should be more prominent?


• Alerts are going to the desktop, to the currently-logged in user. Are there users of the system who aren't logged in who would want to be kept notified of the alerts? Are there users logged in remotely who might want an alert on the shell? How do desktop notifications/alerts translate?


• How do you enable users to take action on alerts? What if there are many alerts from the same application? How do you consolidate them so that users can perform the same action on multiple alerts at once but in a well-informed manner (or at least as informed as the user wants to be)?


• When do you decide to alert a user vs. take action on their behalf without bugging them? To what level should the user be allowed to dictate this if they want more or less notification/control than provided by default?

Just some half-formed thoughts anyway. I would be curious to see if anyone is familiar with guidelines on these. I've looked in a few UI books and guidelines (GNOME HIG, Apple UI guidelines, MS UI guidelines) and haven't found any yet but maybe I'm not looking in the right spots.