You may recall, the direction we’d most recently taken the mockups involved a UI centered around the mount points that are / will be created on the system:

We hashed out some issues to address with this approach. Some we have addressed over the course of our discussion, some we haven’t. Here’s how it broke down:

Issue #1: If you have more than one mount point of the same type on the system, you have an odd name clash.

See, we let you select whatever hard drives / storage devices you want as part of the installation. Now, the drives you select may not be blank / nicely-formatted. Rather, they may have pre-existing OS installations on them, and some of those you might want to keep around – maybe you just want to install in the available empty space on the drive(s). The UI above assumes you’re only displaying mount points for one OS.

• What if I have a Fedora 16 installation on a 1 TB disk that I want to keep around, and I just want to give Fedora 17 a try in my 500GB of free space on the same physical drive? Well, if I have my Fedora 16 partitioned with /, /home, /var, swap, etc., those mount points will show up in the left bar in the mockup right alongside the new /, /home, /var, etc. that I’m creating for my new install. Oops.
• What if I want to blow away that Fedora 16 install and install Fedora 17 fresh in the same space? When those F16 mount points show up, how do I know if they are the F16 ones that I should delete/format, or if autopart already handled that and they are my new Fedora 17 ones?

So we thought through a few ways to accounts for this:

A dropdown between OSes

(Ignore the emblems, we were playing with them for another idea.)

It’s uncluttered since you only see one OS at a time. You know which OS you’re looking at so you know what the mount points are for. It’s not super-discoverable, though; it’s also a tad clunky visually – I’m not sure it’s very common to have a dropdown embedded in the left sidebar of a screen layout like this. Generally I don’t like dropdowns as a main navigation elements like this because I think they are physically harder to target than alternatives (a made more crystal clear to me than ever with spending the past week wearing a brace on the wrist of my primary hand. Sigh.)

So, meh.

A Nested Tree

You know, I’m sure there is a time and place for nested trees, but I try to avoid them like the plague. Depending on the implementation of course, sadly they often depend on targeting an area that is on average 12×12 pixels in size – not cool. Implemented properly, clicking either the [+] or [-] icon will toggle opening up a section of the tree, but this isn’t always possible. For example, in Nautilus’ list view, you can only click the [+] or [-] icon – clicking on the name of the folder opens up that folder fully in an icon view. Ick.

We didn’t bother mocking this one up. Don’t mean to hate on you nested tree luvas out there. If I’m nuts for this attitude, school me (*politely*) in the comments.

Ditching the system vs data labels and using those labels to demarcate OS

This one is pretty clean, but it will likely require a scrollbar. Also! It means the system vs. data slider up at the top will make a lot less sense and probably will need to be ditched as well. :-/

Cell-phone style nav of the mount point list

Yeah. I put this mockup in a subdirectory called ‘crackrock.’ I have actually never seen this done before (have you?) It seems like an interesting way to separate out the different OS mount point listings without using a tree view, but it’s kind of an odd pattern and would probably confuse people.

Accordion-style nav of the mount point list

This is the one that Chris is working on today. (Thanks ebassi for helping figure out how!) The Accordion menu is a common UI design pattern, and while for some installs it will require a scrollbar, I think it maybe solves the problems in the best manner here.

What do you think?

Issue #2: When do we do autopart?

David Lehman and I also talked about in which scenarios do we auto-partition a device for the user vs. let them decide what to do. If you have a disk with a contiguous chunk of space that meets the minimum space required for autopart, we *can* do autopart – it doesn’t require a completely formatted disk/device. We decided that we should allow you to autopart a disk and then customize it; you might want to use the autopart scheme as a guide to start from in your customizations.

One idea on the table is that instead of doing autopart on the free space that’s available by default, we’ll leave it blank and have an ‘empty list message’ that says something like, ‘you have no partitions; create some below or click here to have us create them for you.’

Here is a mockup showing this:

Issue #3: How can we make it less confusing to understand which partitions are getting wiped and which are safe / going to be left alone?

(Not sure on this one.)

I think we should think about what should the default behavior be – wipe it all and opt-in to preserving select partitions, leave everything alone and opt-in to wiping select partitions, or install side-by-side and leave what’s there alone.

One thing to consider is to have a flag users could set when they choose to disk to indicate that if it’s okay to wipe the whole thing, and by default preserve the data. Maybe? Or maybe use the settings (‘gear’ icon) in the custom partitioning screen’s left nav bar’s bottom to let them do this, although at this point we are speaking in terms of mount points/partitions and not devices so I believe this is too late.

Issue #4: Will we support mounting the same mountpoint from different OSes?

I think we decided not to support that since mounting the same home from different OSes is not an advisable thing to do. For example, if you have different versions of the same app sharing the same .config directory, odd things can go down. Mounting simpler stuff than /home, like a /srv across OSes/ is simple to do post-install so there isn’t a lot of advantage of doing it in the install. (And you could always script it if you wanted to in a kickstart post. Remember, at least the plan is to support inheriting settings from detected KS files when you use the Anaconda UI.)

Issue #5: Can people remove devices in the custom partitioning screen?

What if their disk is full and all they want is to reformat a root device and assign some mountpoints — no device removal/creation?

The two cases where someone ends up in custom part are:

• (A) They opted in *before* the disk space reclaiming UI – they already had plenty of space so the space reclaim UI wasn’t offered up to them.
• (B) They did disk reclaiming and still came up short.

Issue #5 here is clearly case B. To reformat a root device and assign mountpoints, they could one-by-one hit the ‘-’ icon in the bottom of the left sidebar in the custom partitioning screen to remove partitions from the device and re-add them. How do we know to format it? Should we always format if all partitions are removed from a device in our custom partitioner?

Issue #6: Is the intention that the interface will be pre-populated with all the filesystems on the devices selected for installation?

Yeh, I think it’s a good idea. If you had a disk/device you wanted to preserve the filesystem of in its entirety, you wouldn’t have selected it on the device selection screen. This means that if a device you selected has a filesystem present on it and you’ve made it as far as the custom partitioning screen, you either want to blow it away or keep it around. If you want to keep it around, you’re likely to be a bit anxious (especially with a re-vamped installer ) about whether or not the data is going to make it, especially if you are lazy like me and don’t do backups in this situation AS WE OF COURSE RECOMMEND THAT YOU ACTUALLY DO! (Do as I say, not as I do!!) To see that the data is there on screen I think maybe helps with this anxiety. Although to be honest, maybe thinking about storage this much has made me focus too much on anxiety-aversion.

But yeah, nobody wants their data to get blown away so I do believe being able to see it there safe and sound (maybe with some further reassuring indicator it won’t be touched – one idea is to grey out the options on it unless you explicitly say yeh I want to blow it away, see mockup below) is a good idea.

Thoughts?

So…

That’s where we’re at right now with the custom partitioning UI. Do note that the custom partitioning UI is opt-in only, except in the case where you don’t have enough space for install and the space reclaim UI wasn’t able to squeeze your filesystems small enough to make room. (And honestly in that case, it is too, although the default option in that scenario is ‘Sorry Charlie, time to quit the installer.’)

As you can see, we have a number of open issues or directions we’re starting to explore, so if you have thoughts, (polite) admonitions, or brilliant ideas, let us know in the comments! We also have these discussions very informally in #anaconda on irc.freenode.net, and your (polite) participation is certainly welcomed there.

OMG you’re redesigning the anaconda installer?

Yes!

• Why oh why are we doing this? Learn here.
• You can read lots more of my scribblings about the project in this blog’s ‘anaconda’ category.
• We also have a Fedora wiki page for the project.
• Drop by #anaconda on irc.freenode.net if you’d like to get involved or simply voice your opinions.

(Polite Panda for Fedora 19?)

Fedora 17′s grub2 screen won’t be the ugly black and white thing you saw in Fedora 16. The reason for the ugliness in Fedora 16′s grub splash is that it was the first release we used grub2 and there were some missing files that prevented the theme from working at all. We punted on it because grub’s splash is not shown by default and we had higher-priority issues to work on for Fedora 16.

Spot and Peter Jones figured out how to get grub2 theming to work properly for Fedora 17 so we have this design now, put together as we hashed it out on the Fedora design team list. It’s using the background from Alexander Smirnov’s excellent fireworks design; the menu box is slightly modified from the grub2 default shipped theme (called ‘starfield.’)

I made a video showing it as well, but it’s shaky and nothing amazing. One thing visible in the video though – there’s a quick flicker before the graphical boot menu comes up, and after rebooting multiple times to try to read it Spot figured out it says something about a missing en.mo.gz locale file. If you have any ideas on how we can fix this issue, please let me know

Anyway, when Fedora 17 comes out, if you opt-in to displaying grub you’ll have something nicer to look at.

Fedora 18 is going to be called Spherical Cow.

Wait, what? Yes, Spherical Cow.

“/doh” by Hobvias Sudoneighm (striatic on Flickr), used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Tatica broke the news about the Fedora 18 release name in Vienna to Emichan and me and we have been discussing it tonight. We all have some concerns with it.

Spherical Cows Falling Flat

Fellow Fedorans, don’t you think this has gone a step too far now? We don’t want to Fedora to be a joke, right? What message are we sending about Fedora with these kinds of names? Even if we had the best, most amazing artwork ever paired with a flawless user experience, don’t you think a name like ‘Spherical Cow’ makes it seem as if we as a community don’t care about Fedora or that we don’t believe Fedora is something to be taken seriously? If we believe in free software and we want users to adopt it, how can we convince them to take it seriously with names like this?

“Beefy Miracle,” as Tatica pointed out, has been a challenge for Spanish-speaking Fedora Ambassadors to explain to potential Fedora users at events. Ambassadors are asked quite frequently what the differences are between Fedora and other Linux OSes. Traditionally, the answer has been that Fedora is more for professionals and that it’s a serious distro that takes a progressive stance towards adopting new technology. Whether or not you agree with this answer, it is certainly undermined by silly names, putting our ambassadors in an odd position.

Now, Beefy Miracle, while very much a Fedora community inside-joke and very silly, has had a devout following for a long time and is part of the history of Fedora itself, and he has served as the generic face of Fedora in the generic-logos package. So, I think the extra effort for supporting Beefy Miracle is something that many Ambassadors, including Tatica, do not mind.

But Spherical Cow? Really? What does “Spherical Cow” have to do with Fedora? Where are the “Spherical Cow” devotees? Where is the connection to our community? I don’t see it.

Beefy Miracle aside, we don’t believe that we should have wacky names every release. Furthermore, our names are random and follow a complex and hard-to-understand “is-a” test that causes confusion to pretty much anybody who tries to join in the naming process:

• The complex and non-obvious “is-a” rule makes the naming process seem rather exclusive and difficult, discouraging new participants.
• Since so many folks suggesting names don’t understand the “is-a” rule, a lot of names are suggested that can’t be used, creating a lot of work for the folks running the naming process in checking and rejecting the names that don’t fit.
• The names, for the most part, require some explanation and even with explanation, they are difficult to understand. A community with inside jokes you don’t understand doesn’t feel very welcoming. It’s okay to have inside jokes; what’s wrong is to externalize those inside jokes at the level of the release name which is currently publicized fairly widely.
• The end result is a stream of random names that are completely unrelated, without any common thread or sense about them:
  • Yarrow
  • Tettnang
  • Heidelberg
  • Stentz
  • Bordeaux
  • Zod
  • Moonshine
  • Werewolf
  • Sulphur
  • Cambridge
  • Leonidas
  • Constantine
  • Goddard
  • Laughlin
  • Lovelock
  • Verne
  • Beefy Miracle
  • Spherical Cow

“Sad Panda” by maalokki on Flickr), used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

We’re Not Alone

I don’t think Tatica, Emichan, and myself are alone in this thinking. There was a lot of support for our position in a Fedora advisory-board list thread last month. Here are some highlights from that thread:

• Seth Vidal said:
  

  I think we should drop the naming process altogether. For the following reasons:

  1. the names do not serve any use
  2. the names are a waste of time and effort to administer the process
  3. no one remembers the names.
  4. the names are potentially divisive.

• Bruno Wolff said:
  

  I don’t think the ‘is a’ process has resulted in consistant good pools of names.

• David Nalley said:
  

  Now that we’ve had Zod and Beefy Miracle – is there really any point continuing?

• Jaroslav Reznik said:
  

  The perception of the name inside the project, the core people (for us, Beefy Miracle has something magical and you can imagine Bacon!) will be different compared to outside ones. For them it could be more difficult to understand it – some people could be offended (even we don’t see reason), some people who understand fun would be just laughing, some would be angry…

  So I don’t think we have a problem inside our community but that *outside* perception could actually sound not the way we wanted it.

• Seth Vidal also said:
  

  I stopped participating or caring in the names a long time ago and from asking around to some of my peers, I’m not alone.

• Jason Brooks said:
  

  Names can be useful, but Fedora hasn’t made much use of them.

I think my favorite quote from the thread is from Matthias Clasen:

I agree – the naming thing started as a fun game, then it got ‘standardized’, and now it is just one more process that has stopped to be either fun or useful. Apart from the problems that Seth has listed, others have pointed out that the expected connection of the release name to the artwork is more often than not problematic.

Time to reevaluate and come up with something fresh and fun that we can do for each release.

Along this line, a suggestion from mario juliano grande balletta:

My only suggestion, based on being new with Fedora, and still full of energy and excitment to work with all of you, is simply stay positive, focus on the fun, smile, find ways to agree, look for the good, insist on being happy, focus on the new, and make changes!

Well, come on then! Let’s do this as a community, okay? We agree with many of the sentiments in the thread that having a release number without any kind of name is a bit cold, especially as our version numbers climb higher and higher. The recent release naming process election results suggest you may feel similarly:

• 550 Fedorans are in favor of keeping the release name, but potentially exploring a new process for developing it.
• 384 Fedorans do not support keeping release names.

A Proposal to Move Forward

Here is our (Emichan, Tatica, and me) suggestion for moving forward on this:

1. As a community, let’s propose different schemes along which we can come up with release names moving forward (Fedora 19 and beyond.) These schemes should result in nice names that won’t be quickly exhausted and will reflect on Fedora positively in some way. Let’s take until June 1 to do this.
2. Once we’ve had a sufficient period of time to come up with naming schemes, let’s decide on the naming scheme we want to use together as a community.
3. For Fedora 19, we can follow a naming process very similar to the one we follow today. The only difference: there is no “is-a” rule for vetting names. The names are instead vetted for adherence to our selected naming scheme, as well as vetted by the entire community for suitability / non-offensiveness, by the Board, and by the Red Hat legal team as well.

We have a wiki page we’ve started with Feodra naming theme suggestions. Please submit your ideas to it.

Thoughts?

I started out by poking around with the visual design of the drag handles, and Robin had the idea to make the space between partitions draggable and to use a model where you only drag between two partitions at a time. I think it will make more sense to do it that way, at least in this iteration. Initially I wanted there to be a free bucket on the right side that would grow as you shrank the partitions, but I think that makes it a little confusing as to how you would re-grow that partition if you changed your mind. Non-intuitive in the manner that the affect of your dragging can be displaced by more than just the next box over and it might not be immediately apparent to you that you can grow your partition even though it isn’t immediately adjacent to a block of free space.

Smooge had the idea that there should be a clear indicator of how much you can squeeze down a given partition, so now the partitions have a lightly-colored graph to indicate their relative fullness (white means free space.)

Nicolas suggested a pie chart rather than a bar graph to get users out of the mindset that this is meant to be an accurate representation of how space is laid out on-disk: I will be exploring that in another round but decided not to try it this time.

Puppy Dog’s Tails brought up the point that not displaying partitions based on whether or not their resizing is supported might not be the best idea. I do agree with his rationale and have found myself in the trap he described many times (“Hmm, it’s gone! Is it a bug, or was that intentional, or what?”) so I put an un-supported VFAT partition (yes, I forgot to label it ‘VFAT’ in the mockup, oops) in this round of mockups to represent that. Another concern Puppy Dog’s Tails brought up was “Disks need some free space to operate efficiently. Perhaps some naive user will take all the free space and allocate it to Fedora and be surprised when they boot back into Windows and it complains or runs slowly.” To answer that, the intention here (as achievable as it may or may not be, David Lehman will probably know the answer to that ) is to not let the users put themselves in that situation. I’m thinking a 500 MB buffer or so might be reasonable but David will probably know best there; the main point is we shouldn’t allow users to shoot themselves in the foot like that and absolutely shouldn’t take every last drop of free space since it’s probably not practical in most situations.

Okay, so here’s the thinking in this round:

Display partitions that we can’t resize

Here we’re showing a tiny EFI partition that can’t be resized. It’s small enough it doesn’t have a label on the graph, so you must click it to get a little label to pop up below it.

Display details on resizeable partition

Here we’ve clicked on the ‘BOOTCAMP’ partition and get a little extra information displayed about it below: the max we can make it right now is 50 GB, the smallest we can make it is 30 GB. That max 50 GB comes from the free space available; would it be useful to give it a max based on all free space on the drive (would be roughly 54 GB since there’s about 4 GB free on the ‘Macintosh HD’ partition, it appears.) What do you think? Is the ‘max you could do *right now*’ or ‘max you could do if you squeezed everything else’ more useful (noting this is a UI for making space for an installation of Fedora, not a generic partition manager)?

Deleting a partition

The best way to make space is to delete, delete, delete! This screen is already a lightbox though, and as misguided / foolish as it may be, one of my goals for the Anaconda redesign is that there shall be no more than one level of lightbox or pop-up here. (The current Anaconda suffers from some crazy nested pop-uppage.) But it seems a bit rash to let someone wipe an entire partition in one click without warning when they click that little ‘x’ in the partition’s upper left corner. So why not have a confirm button nested inside the partition’s box with a warning below?

Well, I’ll tell you why not. It’s a bit of a squeeze for smaller partitions. This is where I want to explore Puppy Dog’s Tail’s idea of having two vertical bars – then the graphs will be constrained horizontally, meaning I’ll have consistent horizontal space for a button like this. Maybe…. Maybe…. We’ll see if it works out, that’ll be round 3.

Do note the model here (at least, the intention!) is that you’re queueing up changes to the partition layout, none of which will be committed until you click ‘Reclaim space.’ This means you don’t really delete that partition until you click ‘Reclaim space.’ So maybe the confirm button is overkill. Maybe it’d be better to have a ‘Reset partitions’ button or something to restore the original layout?

What do you think?

Deleting a partition with no room to breathe

Here’s what I mean: the button doesn’t really have enough space… oh and by the way, the stuff under ’160GB Hard Disk’ in the left list are just me puttering around, I’m not sure if it makes sense to list the partitions there as well (current thinking on that is no, it’s redundant.)

Okay, again, these are all rough and just my current thinking after playing around in Inkscape and reading through your comments for an afternoon. Your feedback on the last couple of posts was incredibly helpful so if you’re willing to give it another go to help fuel this onward, please feel free in the comments!

(Note on the sources for this: the sources for these screens and the earlier ones are in the main Anaconda index.svg, in the ‘screen-destination-reclaim-*’ layers. )

I’ve been thinking about the best way to make the partitions look draggable. They only need to be draggable horizontally; the mockup above shows a diagonal drag handle making it seem as if the space could potentially be dragged upwards as well as horizontally (it can’t.) I’ve looked around different UI patterns for this; it seems a lot rely on the mouse hovering over the area to be dragged and the pointer changing to indicate draggability. I’m not sure that’s enough; I think there should be more visual clues that something is draggable that don’t require you to mouse over them to determine draggability.

So here are some mockups I did just experimenting with different looks; some are definitely more successful than others, I think. What do you think?

So there’s a path in the storage flow of the Fedora installer redesign where if you don’t have enough free disk space to complete an install right now, but you have enough latent space available in your partitions if you were to shrink them. We offer to let you shrink them to continue the install in this situation. (This is highlighted in yellow in the flow chart above.) A partition should be considered shrinkable if it has at least one 500 MB+ of contiguous space within a shrinkable partition (not HFS journaled, not VFAT, not EFI, etc. etc.).

Here’s the screen you get should you end up in that situation:

So we’ve been talking about what happens when you click on that ‘Reclaim space’ button.

Tree list approach

First I took a tree list approach. While I hate tree lists, my brain was hurting around the concept that the general ‘list of parent items on the left, click on one, and details about its children are present on the right’ pattern that I find everywhere in the GNOME UI is typically only used for viewing details and not acting on them. There are some cases where you can act on them, but not in this, ‘check off the partitions you want to shrink across disks to get a grand total you shrink in one go’ shopping cart kind of pattern. If that makes sense. I got hung up on this, so I fell back on old reliable tree list.

“There must be a better way,” I told myself. This tree-list thing looks very 1998, and I think that’s being kind.

Click-and-drag approach

We had poked around with draggable partition blocks early on in the mockups for custom partitioning, so I thought maybe revisiting a clicky-draggy interface here might make some sense.

One issue here is when Chris looked at this, he assumed it was meant to represent the layout on disk. See I was thinking the ‘Free’ block could represent all free, unpartitioned space on the disk, and it would grow as you dragged the Firefox-textbox-style drag handles inward on any partition that was shrinkable. Is it a big problem if the diagram doesn’t represent the physical layout of space on the disk? I’m wondering if there’s some way to make it look, um, less ‘accurate’ or representative in that way so we don’t have any kind of cognitive dissonance screwing up how folks read this screen.

Click-and-drag approach with more block data

I think Chris very rightly classified this one as TMI. However, the idea here is you click on a block in the diagram and you get extended information about it below, in this case, that there are 3 blocks of particular sizes contained in the ‘free’ category.

Click-and-drag approach with less block data than before

An attempt at less TMI.

Where to go from here?

Well, what do you think? Is this approach generally the right one? Have any ideas on how to make the graph feel less like it’s representational of the actual layout of blocks on disk? Overall impressions?

We’ll probably be discussing this in #anaconda on Freenode tomorrow.

So here’s a quick screencast (created using GNOME Shell’s built-in screen recorder with audio using a trick posted to GNOME bugzilla by my colleague Dan Allen) that shows how to do some of the things folks more used to Photoshop told me they wished they could do in Gimp. I also threw in a little demo of the Gimp Paint Studio plug-in that I’m in the process of packaging up for Fedora.

Should you happen upon this and have questions about how to do other stuff you’re used to in Photoshop (or any bitmap tool) and can’t figure out in the Gimp, let me know and I’ll try to screencast it. With the new trick configured in my GNOME shell setup, it is so dead simple to do screencasts I’m looking for excuses to do more!

UPDATE: Uh, the link to the video off of the thumbnail preview actually works now Thanks to ‘k’ for pointing it out in the comments!

It allows you to define an area within an image (in my case, the four corners of the whiteboard frame) and drag on those points to stretch the image out. For this whiteboard photo that was taken at an angle, this process resulted in a straightened-out image of the whiteboard. (I followed up with a Difference of Gaussians cleanup that Garrett taught me a while back )

It’s a pretty magical tool. Give it a try!

About two years ago I first used the Nook app on Android. That was my very first foray into buying digital books.

I’ve been trying to pare down my possessions in a manner Leo Babuta and Erin Doland would most certainly approve of over the past couple of years. A love of books doesn’t work so well with having few possessions.

Digital books promise:

• You can read your book on a number of different devices
• You can travel light and have your entire library at your fingertips
• Your books won’t take up any physical space in your home
• Food, drinks, and fire won’t mean you don’t own a particular book any more. Even if you leave your device on the plane, you’ll be able to get your books back (well, maybe.)

What stopped me from diving in head-first for a long time were some things that worry me about digital books:

• Buying a digital book in a format that goes out of fashion and no longer being able to read it (my well-worn and well loved Anne of Green Gables physical book I have had since I was probably 8 years old is still on my shelf, and I can read it without having to hack or crack it.)
• Buying a book from Amazon because B&N didn’t have it, and not being able to read the Amazon book on Nook and vice-versa.
• Owning a nice collection of books that span multiple stores that are not compatible with each other.
• Buying a cookbook, finding a great recipe you’d like to cook with a friend, and being unable to send her a copy of the recipe to buy the ingredients from because there is no way to send an excerpt of the book, copy the text, or even scan the text. (Had to manually type it out in an email. Ridiculous, right?)
• Buying a digital book from Barnes & Noble and being unable to read it on my Linux laptop. (Yeh, not really possible without cracking the book. That is possible, depending on which bookseller you bought it from. Legal? I’m not sure, even though the purchase was 100% legit.)

Well, I won a Nook Tablet in a raffle today. I’m really excited about it because it seems like a nice device. I fully intend to root it. My experience with trying to use it in the way it was intended has not been so nice so far, however.

I had a lot of difficulty getting digital books I validly and legally purchased from Barnes and Noble on to the device. I had backup copies of the books that I had purchased via the Nook Android app long ago (I hope this is legal. It should be.) Customer support told me they would not work if I transferred them onto the device. So then I asked if they could be transferred from my old account to my new one.

“Ma’am, can you still access your old email address?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can’t transfer them for you.”

“Okay, let’s say I can’t access it.”

“All right, let me transfer them for you.”

What?

Okay, so he took a look at my old account.

Did you ever stop to think how much any customer support person at a bookseller can learn about you on a personal level by being able to read the titles of the digital books you own? This is something usually only someone you allow into your home and who has visual access to your bookshelf can do. I was surprised at how uncomfortable this made me, it felt like a real violation of privacy even though I know it’s technically not.

Anyway, the books I wanted weren’t in that account. My husband figured out that they were actually in his account, because Android devices still aren’t real great at handling multiple accounts on one device. Sorry, a digression. So I gave the (remarkably patient) gentleman my husband’s email address. His supervisor came on the line. She said she could initiate the transfer of my books, but she would need the credit card number they were purchased on entered into my account, because the books were encoded to that credit card number.

“I’m sorry ma’am, I don’t have that credit card any longer. It was actually stolen…”

“That’s okay, you can provide any currently-active card.”

“Um, but you just said…”

“Any card will do.”

Okay. So I entered my current credit card number into the my Nook account. She put me on hold. I waited 5-10 minutes. The earlier gentleman came on the line.

“Ma’am, did you put your credit card in?”

“Yep!”

“Well, it seems like it was invalid. The books have been transferred to your account, but you cannot download them unless an active credit card number is registered to your account.”

“But I just put it in…”

“You will have to call your bank.”

“What?”

“We cannot allow you to download these books without a valid credit card. We must protect the publishers.”

“But I bought these books!”

“Call your bank, then you can download them.”

“Do I have to call this number again afterwards?”

“No, the books should appear in your account after your credit card clears.”

I typed my credit card in again and refreshed. Magically, the books appeared while the gentleman talked a bit more about protecting publishers and clearing credit cards with the bank.

“Okay I can download them now.”

“What?”

“Oh okay it cleared.”

“Okay, can I removed the credit card from my account now?”

“No.”

“What?”

“It’s not possible.”

Basically, I am now more scared than ever to invest in digital books:

• No option to avoid using credit card. My credit card number was likely stolen because of the Sony Playstation Network account hacking incident. Why should I trust Barnes & Noble with my credit card on the Nook?
  How can you use the device without a credit card?
  • Even if there is a gift card on your account, you cannot purchase books without a credit card on the account.
  • Even if the app you are trying to install is free, you cannot download it without a credit card.
  • Apparently, even if books you legally and validly purchased from B&N are in your account, you may not download them to your device without a credit card.
• I was able to have all of the books transferred from my husband’s account without any form of verification. Don’t give Barnes & Noble my email address and ask for my books to be transferred from my account to yours, because it just might work. No verification of his first and last name, no verification of his home address, phone number, nothing. I gave them his email address and they accepted that as sufficient to slurp all of the books out of his account! (It was, of course, totally okay with him. But what if it wasn’t?)
• Backing up your books does you no good. At least, according to the customer service rep. Now, I know a thing or two and believe this isn’t the case, but if you are a law-abiding citizen who doesn’t try to crack DRM mechanisms in order to enjoy the items you paid Real Money for the right to enjoy, this is really the case.

I try not to rant in my blog. I really do. I couldn’t help this one. I do get a lot of ribbing and even derision for my stances against Apple products. What I encountered here with the Nook embodies a lot of the issues I have with Apple devices. Is there a succinct, simple name for these issues? DRM-lovin’, proprietary-code, you-can’t-use-what-you-paid-for, hashing-your-credit-card-number-against-media-as-a-form-of-publisher-protection-because-the-developers-are-morons bullshit? How do you refer to this general stench?

Well, anyway, lesson learned. I don’t think I will buy any DRM digital books ever again. The silver lining here is that the experience has reassured me that my beliefs are not crazy, that digital freedom is a very valid concern and us FLOSS folks aren’t just silly hippies.

• GTK3 UI Template for Inkscape (SVG.GZ Inkscape file)
• Architect’s Daughter font (used in the template, OFL licensed)

• Panelists:
  • Sunni Brown (@sunnibrown)
  • Jessica Hagy (@jessicahagy)
  • Dan Roam, Digital Roam (@dan_roam)
• SXSW Synopsis: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9038
• Hashtag: #rapidviz

Sunni Brown

Why Whiteboard Culture Isn’t Pervasive

Many companies don’t have access to whiteboard culture. There are 3 reasons we’re lacking whiteboard culture:

#1 We have nationwide lunacy around visual language

Part of the doodle revolution is overturning it.

Misperception: visual language = art

Visual language is not art. Visual language isn’t typically emotive or emotinal. It’s not really an act of self-expression, it’s more an act of understanding something. It’s not about being beautiful or exemplary. Level of beauty not important. It’s not about ambiguity for the audience. Art is aobut allowing audience to interpet what’s going on – for visual language it’s about eliminating ambiguity.

We have crazy lunatic beliefs about art:

• Art is a luxury good (first thing to go when times are tight)
• Art is elite, you have to be trained, have to be art school
• God-given, genetically incapable, not in their lineage, cannot be developed
• Superfluous… in school and at work. Think art in work or school has no place. Think it’s extraneous
  • Results in starvation / drug addiction / mentally ill (yes! while a luxury!)
  • Frivolous and silly

#2 We have a strong tendency to judge our drawing abilities

• When you judge yourself, you stop trying. accomodating your own incapacitation.
• Perfection is not the point
• Honey badger don’t give a shit, neither should you.

Perfection is not the point. Improved thinking is the point… journal of science.

#3 We don’t know how to take it to work or to school

How does this or that translate to visual language? We are visually illiterate… what does literacy mean?

• identify
• understand
• interpret
• create
• communicate

Allows you to participate fully in society.

3 reasons visual literacy matters

• information density is redonkulously high- imagery has a density that lets you articulate complex objects… clay shirky, filter failure, drawing and sketching is a form of filtering
• market competition is antagonasty. intellectual ventrues – invent and patent technologies. nathan nirval… contentious character… patent troll… over 500 patents, hundred pending. invention session – in one hour, invent up to 60 patentable ideas. they infuse visual language throughout the process. their literacy is very high and it accommodates their cognitive performance
• cognitive neuroscience is explosivo

Needs to be accessible to the rest of us.

Awaken visual cortex by drawing nonsensical situations.

For more:

• Doodle Revolution
• Sunni’s TEDx Talk on Doodle Revolution

Jessica Hagy

Just images do a lot of things. When verbal articulation is complicated, “show me where he touched you on the doll” – can easily identify direction and area when it’s hard to do that in words.

Images help work around linguistic, cultural, or personal misunderstandings. Draw a picture to find a common ground. I cannot sail around the world in a broken teacup. Now that i’ve drawn it and i see it, I’ll remember it for a long time.

• seven of eight tasks complete…. octopus with one tentacle left… humor
• when tensions are high… dog and cat with feed… can help
• because you can

Visuals mean so much.

Dan Roam

A tale of two charts

In the real world where pictures become powerful for us… a tale of two charts. Austin Goulsby, was head of presdient’s board of economic advisors. Used to like to draw a lot of charts. Describing complex ideas, would use a lot of charts. Many of austin’s charts were poster children for the occupy movement. Started to appear on posters by people at occupy.

Glenn beck likes to draw charts. undermine or take exact the opposite pov of austin’s charts. poster children for the tea party.

Both of them have been made fun of Jon Stewart, so they define whats going on today.

Who’s right? they’re both right. not what they’re saying, but the way that they are saying it – they are using pictures to convince.

Power of Pictures

Niemanlab.org study… Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistent subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction.

If you want to convince someone, draw them the picture. It works much better than the words. Not just if you want to convince someone. If you are sitting opposite someone who fundamentally disagrees with you, the more you try to convince with words, the less likely to happen. If you draw a picture that represents graphically, the likelihood of them agreeing with you, goes through the roof.

Arthur Laffer… 1970’s DC… USC economist, friend of Ford admin in 1974. Went to a bar with senior presidential aides… He drew on a napkin became part of public record / Laffer curve. Simple x/y plot. % tax rate gov’t charges us on our income tax. 0% – 100%. If the gov’t charges us 100% income tax brings in 0 money because no one will work.

There’s a curve. They took napkin to president ford. He passed it to the republican national committee… passed to economics team of ronald regan… that became the first time anybody had ever heard of supply side economics. Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were the ones sitting in the bar with Laffer.

Who says a sketch on a napkin doesn’t have power? When we see it, we believe in it, in a way we can’t in words alone.

Pictures aren’t just on one side of the brain

We’re of two minds…

Half of our brain has evolved to be good at looking at little bits of things. Break into pixels, break into pixels. Other half of brain, is about gluing things together. Reading doesnt take place in one half of brain… one half of brain interprets letters, other interprets meaning. We are walking talking visual porcessing machines and we neglect it.

Let’s draw vivid grammar together. Put together the grammar we’ve learned in being literate and verbal into the beginnings of a visual grammar.

For more, check out Dan’s books:

• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
• Blah Blah Blah: What to do when words don’t work

• Panelists:
  • Nick Hasty (@jnhasty), Rhizome
  • Kari Kraus, University of Maryland
  • Jason Scott, Archive Team at the Internet Archive
• SXSW Synopsis: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12909
• Hashtag: #digiprsrv

Introduction

We’re going to present a range of perspectives on archiving – how we go about it, means and methods. Discussion forums, games, user-generated content: we’ll give it a cultural context, beyond the technologies involved. It’s important to keep this, and save it. The internet community as a whole hasn’t done a great job of keeping this stuff (beyond the Internet Archive). We think it’s wroth saving we’re here to tell you why.

Nick Hasty, Rhizome

We present internet art, any kind of production where the intent behind it was within an artist context. Since the beginning of the web, since people could log on and connect to computers, people have been making art. Virtual worlds and games, even if it ran on the PC, the web enabled them with mods and communities to discuss them. Then user-generated content – produced by communities online, hosted by other larger entities (yahoo or google), discussion forums, BBS.. why they are important and often in jeopardy.

Rhizome is a non-profit dedicated to Digital Art and Culture. Started as a mailing list in 1996. Based in New Museum, NYC – independent of that museum as an organization, but collaborate together. ArtBase: Our Archive of Digital Art (1999).We do events and programming in the city, but I’ll focus on the ArtBase. We create records of artworks and we also preserve them. 2500 artwork records, 520+ artworks archived and running on our servers.

When we’re going to archive a work, we work with the artist to get the files, we work to see if they are compatible with contemporary browsers. We’ll take the original artwork, see if it still runs. Clone it, preserve the original, and bring it up to modern browser standards. I’ll show you some things from our archive:

• Little Movies Lev Manovich, 1994-1997 I worked a bit on this over the summer, found that there were missing assets, worked with Lev to get them. The content of any new medium is the old medium – McLuhan like. These little boxes you watch, 1.1 MB pixel boxes. In 1996 it would have taken a while, but it was about the aesthetics of limited bandwidth. What does it do to the experience of watching movies. Today, they load quickly, you can watch them.
• VVWEBCAM (2007) Petra Cortright She takes video of herself, scrolls through the default effects that come with the cam… lightning, pizzas, etc. Put on YouTube, a commentary on how we consume video online. It has over 200 tags, mundane to obscene tags. YouTube took it down because it violated their spam levels. The artist used YouTube to present the work; when YouTube took it down, it was gone. We have it – the context is changed, but it’s still around now. A work that was pretty well documented… taught in universities, pretty major piece. So an interesting tension there with YouTube.
• The Deleted City (2011) Richard Vijgen Artist made a processing app, to visualize the old geocities archive…. geocities was broken up into locations, places, cities, etc. An interactive way to see them visualized on a touch screen. If the site had midi files, they’ll play. Presenting old data in a new interface.

Kari Kraus

Preserving Virtual Works

From the University of Maryland – I preserve virtual 3D worlds. The first project was funded by the Library of Congress. We adopted a case set approach. We were trying to figure out how to archive a set of 8 different video games. Colossal Cave Adventure – first documented interactive fiction. Mystery House – first interactive fiction with graphics. SecondLife – 3D virtual world. We didn’t archive all of SecondLife, just a few key islands. A huge disaster, incredibly complicated.

We have a book-length whitepaper, “Preserving virtual worlds final report” – it’s a free PDF you can download.

Our case set this time is mostly educational game (Doom is in it, not really educational.) Typing of the Dead, Doom, Carmen San Diego, Oregon Trail. Game Bits at the University of Stanford… University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. You can’t save all the features of every game or complex interactive software. You’re going to lose information. Can we try to determine what are the most salient features of these games, to ensure at least those features remain intact. This has proven to be difficult. Surface features, not underlying data structure. Beacuse the games are proprietary, we have no access to source code. This has proven to be enormously challenging. Jason Scott was on our advisory board for that.

Summer 2011, I wrote an OpEd in the NY Times on digital preservation. Two types of of responses. Data as a singular noun instead of plural. Second piece in large volumes, far more positive. The attention I showed to the role of gamers in digital preservation – I use the phrase curatorial activisim to describe that. I want to highlight them to show what they are doing. Recent OpEd in PC World, piracy and preservation. What they do goes way beyond that.

Jane McGonigal’s Ted Talk – Games save bits. In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal’s thesis is that far from jeopardizing our future, video and massively multiplayer online games have potential to helping us solve the world’s most pressing problems. It’s a 21st century way of collaborating thinking problem solving changing attitudes and behavior. She has developed a number of games, world without oil, super strapped, and evoke. Trying to develop creative solutions for world’s most pressing solutions. None of saved the real world yet, or have they?

The kryoflux – designed to read old data types – to rescue 1980s era games played on Commodore 64, Amiga, other vintage games. Gamers created this crazy piece of hardware, now professional archivists use it. It allows you to bypass / circumvent the original computer system or platform, so it’s an extraordinary tool that professional archivists now using. Created by gamers.

DIY/maker mentality can save bits. What they produce is instrumental and practical in nature. Hardware, emulators – the way they do it is playful, exploratory, and experimental. The instruments they produce also have playful one. Commodore 64 re-imagined as a laptop. Xbox360 controller shoehorned into atari 2600 game controller.

These curatorial activists, from video game enthusiasts to dedicated digital preservationists, over the last 2 decades or more, collecting, documenting, rendering video games. No shortage of preservation challenges to content – bit rot, tech obsolescence, code libraries supplied by OS in other packages, digital collections, shifting foundations of rust and plastic. Emails, instant messages – how to archive? The internet is populated with amateur digital preservationists. Saving 8 bit worlds also saves real worlds – translating legacies from one generation to the next. Gamers a precious human resource we can use to do real world work.

Jason Scott

A historian, activist, preservationist… he is here – when he was young, he discovered he was an archivist. He’s recording this whole thing because he doesn’t trust anybody.

Woke up in middle of the night while 9 years old, his mother decided she had to leave the house as soon as possible. A blanket, a dog, and a pillow is all he had left. He had to rearrange things in his life to accommodate mobile lifestyle. He learned nothing is permanent or definite – people get locked up in the way things have been. Shaking up paradigms the way to go about it.

We have all these things going on here in this convention center. 20 other tracks going on right now, we can’t go to them because we mad e a choice to watch this guy. Maybe they’re just as good. We could pull in all of these materials at the same time, but we could easily lose them.

Act Two – come with me if you want to live

The internet archive is a beautiful place, not as crazy as I am… still great. Many people know about it because of the wayback archive. Have the past 10-15 years. They are a non-profit library. Check out what else they have. Thousands of movies, books, podcasts, saved from all over the world that they are trying to rescue. We always think about the now, not what was. There is a contributing set of people holding hands through time agreeing not to destroy these things.

When I joined internet archive, it was because another group i worked with. Archive Team. I saw the death of Tripod and Geocities. We need a team of people to save these items. archiveteam.org – it’s a rogue band of archivists, we’ve been downloading things whether they want it or not. Geocities decided they were closing, we downloaded it and put it up as a torrent on the pirate bay. A 15-year human anthropological study, people speaking with an audience they never had before in the human life time. Only happened because someone wanted to move from column a, column b. Gowalla is gone now. Fortune cities is closing within the next 60 days. These are places that people offered people to come to and bring their things on. You have to find a new place or just walk away from it. We feel like saving the data first and asking questions later works for us.

Act Three – Everything was just fine until you came along

When you look at archiveteam, it’s made up of volunteers who have a belief. If you’re involved in something that involves user’s data, content – even if the laws don’t permit it, you are a caretaker of people’s lives. people are trusting you with data. the easiest way for you is to add an export function as fast as you add that import function to let people pull that data off. if you’re good, it doesn’t matter. if you’re not interesting, they weren’t going to stick around anyway. if you walk away with nothing else today, definitely please add an export function, and think about shutdown. it happens. it happens to all of us.

Coda – everything you own is gone and everyone you love is dead

thikn of your life as what you’ve learned and what others can learn from what you learned. our data is becoming us. we are becoming a hive mind. if someone slaps someone in the line at the grocery, we all know about it. if somebody mistreats their partner – we here about it. hive mind, you’re a bee, it’s okay, being a bee is cool, part of the advantage of being that, stackexchange, wikipedia, can provide us a way to share information with each other. get better faster and quicker. solve problem sthat previously would have dominated thought for year son end, in minutes.

we need to preserve what we’ve done. we’re too focused on the start. we won’t be doing it forever.

I never shut up and you shouldn’t either

Conclusion

Nick Hasty

For us, each one of our archival practices, we’ve dealt with friction, creative content hosted online by a larger entity that controls the means of dissemination. a youtube, a yahoo, id software… they have control over the long term life of this thing. they make decisions that can really affect.

rhizome, internet archive, trying to preserve this stuff, we can only do so much ourselves.

what are other people doing in the gaming community, what’s the context of that, what are the implications of that, the instability and tension of these two things. what needs to change, how can we circumvent it?

Kari

One of the things Jason does is he gets bits from geocities and other places that are shutting down with very little warning tell users they are going to lose all of their stuff. if you’re in cultural heritage or non profit, we look at these for-profit companies as the villian. but when i published an op ed about digital presevation, bruce sterling replied, he donated a lot of his papers to university of texas but he didn’t include any electronic materials or papers. he believes digital preservation is a fools errand. inherently unstable storage and conditions. “i used to worry about floppy disks. now i worry about the universities.” to outrun the short lifespans of the media we use to store our bits necessitates a constant budget. in the larger political climate, higher ed is under attack via funding, museums receiving less funding, he doesn’t think the project is sustainable. do you think we are in this scary era where we’re aware of the precarious nature of our stuff on the cloud, but we do tend to think of museums / archives / universities as stable institutions and environments. I think Bruce is spot on when he questions that assumption. We’ll have to rely on innovative services like kickstarter, Jason demonstrates that veyr well. We need a new set of skills to do that. You can’t be shy to use kickstarter. We need to train the next generation of archivists.

Nick

In the internet art world, it’s a different situation. These are things – Petra’s video on YouTube – it’s bound into the context in which it’s shown. YouTube is part of the context of the work. The terrible comments, bad obscene stuff – it’s a comment about how we look at YouTube and consume media. Oh, we have a backup – doesn’t speak to the long term context of it. We can’t run youtube – we can’t run that on rhizome’s servers. I don’t expect YouTube to be sensitive to this but – what these things, what they are hosted on, part of what’s wrapped into it. We do what we can. Newer artists, younger artists… internet is bound up into what they are doing. They are more savvy, abundant storage, they keep everything up, online, and available. It’s out there in the cloud, we store it as best we can. We have trouble with things created 15-20 years ago, the hosting provider is gone, they didn’t back it up… maybe they moved and lost a hard drive. It’s the older stuff we work on now. We do archive new stuff, and we do bring in new stuff, but we have a special place for things that are older. Things that establish the genre itself… the net.art – it comes from a garbled email between two artists. They were looking through, trying to make sense of it. The medium screwed it up. Some of the works of the guy who coined that term, his works were lost. It’s an important time that should be findable and browseable… we emphasize access, modifications if need be, keep it so people can go back and look at it.

Jason

The Cray supercomputer, world’s most expensive love seat. You can now run it on a laptop. It was a big deal, Chris who lives in New York got his hands on a disk pack in the late 70’s, early 80’s disk pack. He wanted the data off of it. Everything associated with it is dead, nowhere to read it. The archivists and institutionalists will say, this is a tragedy. This is what we have to fight against. People dead inside don’t care about it. Technical people will say this is a problem we need to solve. Activists will say we have to find out what’s on here before, and tell people to help us. Someone wrote an arduino guided magnet to go over the disk, read its data. This resulted in a 20gb image, magnetic flux recording. But there was no place to host this. People contacted me, I put it on the internet archive and our blog – a 20 gb magnetic flux image of a Cray disk. Can anyone help us get data off of it and read what the data is and read its format.

48 hours later, a guy in Norway took a look at it. A guy in Australia had a disk back from Cray in the 1980s that had all their localization files. He flew it to NY, someone sat with the disk pack in his lap, read it off to disk.

Negativity was not needed at any point in that. I want people to think about all these different forces that came in there. At no point, no one said ‘this isn’t worthing doing, let’s stop this now’ – I think that happens too much today.

Questions

I love what all you guys do. There’s two different approaches here. Rhizome, University projects – you’re selecting specific works of art, selecting them for a curatorial process, archival process… at the same time, the internet archive has a completely different approach, where you’re constantly downloading tons and tons of data. Are there any ideas to merge those processes together, to make them more easily readable for someone who doesn’ t have time?

Jason can’t speak for the internet archive, but a lot of archivists are taxidermists. They’re looking at things for a certain degree of life. Websites that were up for an average of 6 months with consistent changes. As an objective observer of the internet archive. They really interact with the library of congress, various universities – what they produce is of use to other groups. The WARC format, web archive format to allow long term storage of webpages. We hammered on the gnu wget project, the next version of wget will support that format. All sorts of things involving metadata and taxonomy – everything tries to be flexible in that way. A technically-oriented group that doesn’t have enough funding. Post-grad students want to classify the stuff, no funding. We try to observe other classifications…

I just acquired 10,000 hours of 3,000 shows at the DNA lounge in San Francisco. Many hours. I’m using their own event calendar as its taxonomy. So it’s all based on what their impression of their item is. It could be completely different than what is on the tape. I put that up there, people are benfiting from it on an emotional basis, there are also ways to serach whatbands are on there. Leave it open, reduce frictions for outside groups, so they can feel their work is getting instaneous reaction. As bad as it is, the IMDB is a good example of this. Semi-friction, but what you put it is very high quality. By spreading the word this thing exists… a out-of-work guy looking for metadat for fun guy. I need 6000 of them. My hope is that they are waiting for the word to get out.

Nick

For us it’s a fairly young field. A curatorial aspect to what we’re doing. Limited resources in what we do have, what we can archive, what we can deal with to the best of our abilities. We have people who submit artwork to us. A great team of people who are aware of what’s going on. We also have people who ask us to consider their art. Everyone’s a creator. We’re not trying to write a history of what’s good and bad. People specialize in art history, it’s a thing. Art scene have whole teams with art history backgrounds who are classifying work. Can we get people who can really describe this and make it something meaningful. We need someone with good historical and technical knowledge – it’s a rare set – we need them to get in, describe the work – if we can archive it, we can archive it. Rhizome used to be more open, a listserv, chatoic, it has ossified into the man we’re accused of. It’s funny. One of those things where we want to make this something that is accessible, it’s part of a larger discussion about art and creativity. Internet art is one of these extremely niche things, but this is contemporary art. We want to push that forward, introduce these new aesthetics in the world.

Kari

We chose our case sets, not because they have some intrinsic merit, space war isn’t better than pacman or whatever. What does it even mean to say that you’ve preserved it at all? We were at the experimental and scoping phase. What are the boundary objects of some of these games. Represenational information… the representational information that you need is going to be, among other things, the Apple II DOS manual. That becomes part of your information package. IF that Apple II DOS manual is saved in PDF format, it becomes infinitely recursively, because then you have to save the PDF specification, so the Apple II DOS manual is accessible in the future. Infinite regression means you’re ultimately relying on paper copies at some point. I love the question, if you have ideas, talk to us afterwards. I think that you need someone with Jason’s talents who can crowdsource a lot. Artchive, etc.

What is the most endangered species of media, the nitrate movies of digital?

Jason

the things we think are being recorded but are not. We have no idea if people made contingencies for long-term preservation. Is Facebook? Is SXSW? We believe archive is an archive? Google is an archive like a supermarket is a food museum. There is this inherent trust. Big data means permanent data – does it? Risk in relying on the cloud or shared hosting.

Nick

Usually the majority of what we do is web-based. Was the artwork created using flash or w3 certified standards. 1994 artwork, HTML, plop it in and it works. If JS is funky, we can clean it up. Fairly easy to update. Old version of flash, quicktime, something like that – open up the subject. Old actionscript, ouch.

Saving the data first, asking questions later. There was a talk earlier today, the right to be forgotten. Things stick around when people don’t want them to. Chills us from speaking in the first place. What do you people think about that?

Kari

I’m not an archivist, I’m a scholar who preserves games. I don’t know if an archivist would answer this in the same way. We think of archivists as saving everything. But part of their jobs is disposing of materials because not everything can be saved. I don’t htink it’s that controversial. I think part of the challenge is that we have to work hard to ensure future generations cares about what we save. In many instances, dumping bits in a dark archive that is inaccessible for decades is one of the first things we can do. A great article by an austin native, Ernest Clive, Ready Player One. All about hte gameification of digital preservation. How do you motivate future generations to care about the same things you care about? Allowing our bits and content to be re-used and transformed can be valuable.

Nick

our rule of thumb – we talk to the artist. We’ve gone to seminal people, and they don’t want us to archive it, and we don’t want us to do it. Or people will tell us don’t fix it, it’s not meant to be fixed. I’ve been talking to people who were more active back in the earlier days. People have suggested Jasn’s approach. Just get it, tell them later. At the end of the day, better to have it or not have. We may not be able to show it, but it’s still around. We haven’t done this, but it’s something that’s been going around.

I have a similar question. Petra video that got erased reminded me of a Robert erased dekoonig, drawing by wilhem dekoonig, a blank piece of paper. the fact it got deleted by an algorithm is essential to the piece. What about github? Security exploit that happened recently, a lot at stake there, are you working with them at the internet archive?

Jason

We ask the question, what would happen if this was gone? We downloaded thingaverse, momar kadafi’s site hours before it disappeared, an ethiopian news agency going away – we keep asking the question. Stack exchange made all their items avialable, we grabbed a copy. Usenet – Google screwed it up. We constantly ask the question… life insurance is trying to convince people about actuary tables. you’ve got children… have you thought about what’s going to happen if you’re not part of the puzzle. Here’s a contingency. A lot of websites and functionality is shared. Sourceforge concerns me, github concerns me. Facebook’s utter domination of all human photographic expression is very dangerous. Very sociopathic company… strange place to store your things, but people are doing it. Asking non-trivial , non-intuitive questions. We ask these questions. We have a tool, git annex… lets you check things into git without putting the items in there… an indexer. Using git’s ability to check it in. Let me examine it using git’s tools – a way to turn websites and things out there into indexed files you can then manipulate, I always want to ensure a copy of this is on my local drive over here. You join this hive, you and five people guarantee the safety of this ongoing data. Geekery and skills to do this. Make sure verything you’re doing is in other places. “ANIL -” “think up” – providing you with the tools, they’re a little clunky now. I’m going to take back the responsibility. I’m my own IT dept, without the pain. Parallel flickr. The team is downloading all the CC images on flickr.

Nick

We use git and github as a backup. We worry about these services, but if they didn’t exist we couldn’t do what we do. We depend on third party services. Dropbox helps us get stuff done so much better. You can’t reinvent the wheel for everything. Do what you can, keep what you can local.

These are just thumbnail sketches meant to express some ideas visually than serve as a guide for visual layout or any kind of formal mock up. I would love to know what you think about any of them. For each:

• Does it seem like a useful feature? Would you use it?
• Does it remind you of anything you’ve used before?
• Can you think of a better way to visualize the idea?
• Does it not belong in a mailman webui?
• How do you think it would shape conversation on a list?

#17 List Monthly Health

It might be cool for moderators to be able to have a monthly ‘bill of health’ for their list. What’s the population like, and how has it changed? Were there more or less posts than usual? How much spam did we get? What’s the male-to-female ratio? Out of all the members, how many are actually posting? How bad was the flaming? How many people from @example.com are participating vs. other domains? Etc.

#18 Special Commit List Layout

Mailing lists sometimes get used for special purposes outside of human discussion. Commit lists are an example of one of these. On a call I had with the Mailman developers at their coding sprint at PyCon today, I think it was Barry who said they are looking at plug-in based displays; a plug-in type system could be a good way to do displays special content like these. Anyway, this is a super-lame sketch to just show that you could have some kind of gitweb or svnweb or cvsweb integration with your commit list archives.

In a similar vein, you could have a special display for meeting minutes lists, or ticket/bug-based lists.

#19 Thread Starter Moderates It?

So here is an idea: it seems sometimes folks who are intimidated by mailing list head to blog planets where they can moderate comments/responses to their posts in their own way. So how about having it so that not only do moderators get the ability to moderate all posts on a list, but so the person who started the thread gets special — limited only to the threads she started — permissions to moderate replies to a thread? I’d imagine the interface being somewhat like WordPress’s comment moderation system.

#20 Podcast Script Generator

This idea is inspired by Fedora Weekly News which, in large part, is a curated and edited-down form of the most important topics brought up across Fedora’s mailing lists. Here, you can select the lists of interest, select a time period, and it’ll develop a ‘podcast script’ for you to read off information from. You might get, for the time period, the top 5 highest-rated or most-replied-to threads for a list in your script.

#21 Post Vote Bucket

So I went to a panel at SXSW that featured Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart. What is kind of funny is that I never knew and kind of wondering why the website was called “A List Apart.” Well, he actually explained why during his talk. Speaking as if mailing lists were an obsolete technology nobody used any more (well, hey, different circles I guess), he mentioned how he and some colleagues had a list about web technology, but that certain people tended to dominate the conversation and things would get unbalanced. So he explained how he (and I think Eric Meyer? Could be wrong) would moderate the list on a daily basis, to curate only the good / interesting content that had been sent out. It would be compiled into almost a newsletter format send out both via email and posted to the web. For various reasons that seemed maybe dramatic that he didn’t go into, they lost the list, but were able to keep the website, and the name from the days of it being a list stuck.

Anyway, long story aside, one way I know of curating content is to give discerning folks a limited set of votes to spend how they like on ideas. What if we gave people a bucket of votes (maybe your bucket could be bigger or smaller depending on your experience / skill / level / whatever) to up-vote posts on the list with, to be replenished monthly?

#22 Mentioned in Thread Refs

A lot of times folks reference fantastic resources and media across a thread, but there is no one place to grab them all – they are buried treasures in the wall of text in the archives. This is a quick idea for some kind of per-thread sidebar that could list out all references and media mentioned across the thread.

#23 In-Thread Survey

While you’re reading in a thread, you might be thinking to yourself, “ugh, this thread sucks!” or “wow, this is funny, tee hee.” Instead of complaining or raving in the thread itself and cluttering it, why not get it out with a little in-context survey in the thread? This could help warn others and spare them the pain of reading hours of so-bad-you-can’t-look-away trollrific flames.

#24 List Summary Page

Even in the same community, the climate and culture of a list can vary from list-to-list. It can be really hard to figure out, as a newcomer, the nature of a list without lurking for weeks and reading back in the archives. This sketch is an idea of how, in a list’s details page, we could give newcomers a quick picture of the general climate of a list. Who tends to make discussions that stick here? Who moderates? What are the hot topics? What recent threads are popular now? What time of day / week / month is the list most active? What are the rules?

#25 Take It Offlist Suggestor

We’ve all been there, right? A back-and-forth ping pong exchange, friendly or heated, between two folks who seem to want the world to watch what should probably be a private conversation. Maybe, if we could detect these kind of hi-jinks going on, would it be useful to have an anonymous and polite ‘take it off list’ suggestion posted to the folks involved? (How much do we want to encourage discussion to flow on list vs off list?)

#26 Mailman Day Survey

Yes, the 1st of every month is Mailman day, where you get tons of list subscription reminders in your inbox, like a monthly Christmas of sorts. Why not make those messages a bit more fun, and put little surveys in them? Click this link to vote this list as being flamey this month! Last month it was – meh! Care to summarize the month?

Maybe too much work on the users. Probably.

#27 Embedded Bugzilla Escalation

Yeh, I’ve been “that person” too. You know, the one who complains on a mailing list that my software is broken and it must be a bug, without thinking to search bugzilla to see if it’s a known bug and if there is a workaround before complaining about it. If we can detect a post is regarding a bug, maybe we can do that work for the poster, look up whether or not there are bugs with similar keywords to the message, and even offer up a ‘create new bug’ button that will open up a new bug and prefill the text of their mailing list message for editing?

#28 Action Items for List

Some mailing lists are used to coordinate across a team. Well, most are. Teams do things, usually. And sometimes action items come out of a discussion on the list. Would it be useful to have a to do list associated with the list to keep track of who is working on what? Maybe?

#29 Scheduled Nagger

Whether it’s a bad time to discuss because of high emotions, or it’s too soon because of the current point in the release cycle, or because you’re waiting for some external event to happen, you might have to table a discussion for a later date. It might be nice to have a little nagger where you can tell the mailing list, ‘let’s table this for 3 months’ and 3 months later your list will get a reminder to discuss it again.

#30 Freeze Thread Option

Too much is going on. Maybe someone posted something they shouldn’t. Maybe it’s just too flame-y. Maybe there’s a legal reason a thread has to stop. But, it definitely has to stop. What if, instead of turning a list on moderation and blocking all posts, you could block just posts to a particular thread? (Kind of like how web forums let you closed comments on a particular topic?)

#31 Message Annotation

Here is an idea for Flickr-style annotations of a mailing list post. Maybe you’re dissecting a commit or maybe you’re analyzing a post (maybe in another language, and you’re making translation notes?) I don’t know. Might be useful. I worry about how this would affect users connecting to the list only via mail clients and not the web ui.

#32 Refine Posts Into Articles

Earlier there was an idea to ‘promote’ really good posts into articles of some sort. Maybe the articles could be a system built into mailman – each list produces ‘articles’. When a good post is first promoted to article, it goes into the ‘need edit’ bucket for someone to claim to edit down and publish.

Well, again, what do you think? Anything promising here? Anything you’d use?

These are just thumbnail sketches meant to express some ideas visually than serve as a guide for visual layout or any kind of formal mock up. I would love to know what you think about any of them. For each:

• Does it seem like a useful feature? Would you use it?
• Does it remind you of anything you’ve used before?
• Can you think of a better way to visualize the idea?
• Does it not belong in a mailman webui?
• How do you think it would shape conversation on a list?

#1 Promoting Good Posts

The idea here is that someone’s made a brilliant post to a mailing list (it happens!) and you’d like to promote it to a more visible format: maybe press a button and it’ll bring you to a page with a form pre-filled with the message content so you can edit it down into a wiki page. Or maybe it could promote it to a blog post or something (you might have to hook up a wordpress blog or something to the system.) Or maybe it would add a special tag that would make it appear off to the side in a special ‘articles’ section, which is the best of the best mailing list posts? Maybe users would get prompted to promote a post after it’s reached a particular high quality threshold (in the thumbnail, it has 5 stars.)

#2 Embedded keyword highlights

It might be cool to, within a message, have different keywords that appear regularly on-list be highlighted. Sort of like how you can read a book on the Amazon Kindle, there’s a feature where it will highlight passages in the book that many other people have highlighted, so you can scan the page and get a feel for the perceived ‘weight’ or ‘importance’ of the various chunks of text you’re reading on the page. Maybe you could hover over a term and get an idea of how popular it is on the list. Or….

#3 Keyword Summary

For every keyword mentioned on a list (maybe to be a keyword, a term would need more than 10 mentions in a given month) there could be a page to highlight the keyword’s use over time and give a summary of threads/discussions where it played a role. This page could also suggest similar keywords you might want to check out, or even other lists on the same server where that keyword is discussed and people who talk about it a lot.

#4 High School Yearbook (For your list)

If your high school yearbook was like mine, you probably had a section towards the back with ‘titles’ like “Most likely to succeed,” “Best Smile,” “Funniest Person,” etc. Well, maybe something like this would be fun for a mailing list. People who tend to start conversations that spark good discussion could get recognized. People who tend to send long messages, people who get the most kudos – this is the kind of aggregate data that we can only get a vague sense of when we follow a list, but that we could compute and make visible easily so folks just joining a list can get a feel for the list climate and who is who without having to lurk for weeks.

#5 Mail Message Pingbacks

I don’t know if you use WordPress, but I do. One feature that is pretty cool about WordPress is that, depending on how things are hooked up, if another blog mentions one of your blog posts, or if someone tweets about it on Twitter, etc., you’ll get a “pingback” comment to the post which is basically a link reference to the discussion about your post on the external site. It might be cool to have a way to track these ‘pingbacks’ to particular mailing list threads or posts as well. E.g., if a thread gets published to LWN.net, that might be good to track right in the archives for that thread.

#6 User profiles

The last thing any of us want to do is fill out yet another profile, am I right? Yet, we also want to get an idea of “who is this person?” sometimes when we read a post by someone we don’t know. Maybe it’s an opportunity to make a new friend with similar interests, or simply a way to gauge the authority of a person asserting a thing on a list to see if you trust it. We should have enough data about a person’s habits on list to present a picture of their on-list personality. While we need to be careful about not being creepy (like say Google) here, it might be cool to know the types of things someone likes to talk about based on the keywords in their posts, what time of day they tend to be around, the languages they speak (if they are a non-native speaker of the list language, for example, this is good to know because it could color your interpretation differently)… a timeline of their posts to see how long they have been around. That kind of thing.

#7 Family tree thread

Here, well, I’m not sure if this is useful or not, but I was thinking the way threads can break off sometimes might represent a family tree. It might be a useful visualization to explore for viewing a thread.

#8 Welcome Gift

One of my personal goals for creating a nice web interface for mailing lists is to make it easier for users new to the list or the greater community to ramp up and start participating. While some lists a very good about welcoming new users, I thought maybe more lists would welcome new users if there was a contextual prompt to do so. So, if a user is new, maybe a little ‘new’ flag could appear next to their name in posts for a few weeks. And, if someone is new, the old timer users while logged in could be prompted to send a ‘welcome gift’ to them. If we have a badge system, maybe it’s a badge. Maybe it’s just simply a private, off-list friendly note. Not sure. But some kind of positive reinforcement for the new person’s participation to help them feel welcome and rewarded for venturing in I thought might be cool.

#9 Read via Thread Timeline

For a given thread, maybe the first post in the thread, being the ‘conversation starter,’ is shown up top, then directly below you have a timeline that shows via bubbles on the axis when the conversation in reply to the initial post happened. You can, with the left and right arrows, jump forward through the replies via the time they were posted (rather than their threading) and the timeline will highlight where the currently-open post is in time so you can understand when it was posted in relation to the other posts. This view of course prioritizes the timing of posts over their logical relationship to content of other posts.

#10 Top 10 Threads of All-Time

Since mailing lists do tend to be a bit cluttered and there does tend to be an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio at times. This is an idea to make the best of the mailing list more prominent rather than hidden across month after month of archive. It could be based on how many people up-voted a thread maybe. I think giving it a limit, for instance only the top 10 or top 20, would help set a good context for the list too. E.g., “the best threads on this list are about these topics, so I know this list is a good place to talk about those things,” for a newbie examining the list and evaluating if it’s the right list to ask a particular question on.

#11 Topics to be wary of

So, on the one hand, having a place where all the worst flames are stored in one place doesn’t seem like the most uplifting thing to do. On the other hand, if you’re a newbie, you might not know a particular topic is verboten or controversial if you haven’t been around a while to remember the last time it came up and how badly it went. So having a list of topics to proceed with caution towards might be something helpful to have available for a given list?

#12 User’s Filter Tools

Sort of how Slashdot lets you set a default threshold for which posts are visible and which are hidden, here’s an idea for a control panel that individual users could set to customize which posts they see by default. It of course should have sane defaults, and not display negative karma posts by default to users who haven’t logged in. Another idea is to have a killfile / blocklist, not just for people but for topics. So if bacon-mania annoys you, you can block the bacon tag from appearing by default. (Although maybe the messages appear with a one-line description only and you have to click-thru to expand the full post while other posts are expanded by default. If that makes sense. )

#13 Crowdsourced Thread Metadata

This idea I think I got from bugzilla. Bugs, while they can have long discussions attached to them, they can also have aliases, summaries, and sometimes a conclusion (especially if they result in a documented errata.) So why not for a thread? Sometimes you come up with ideas, action items, or a conclusion in a mailing list thread, but it’s buried. Making this a volunteer opt-in metadata fill in might make it easier to understand what a thread is about when coming back to it later on?

#14 Keyword-Based Thread Browse

A weird idea here inspired by ebook readers. What if we bundled all threads about particular keywords into ‘volumes’ or ‘books’ on a shelf that you could open to read all about a given list’s take on that term? Here you see a horizontally-scrolling list of ‘books’. Click on one, and you’ll get a list of the threads that involve that term from the list, most recent to oldest.

#15 Images in Messages

One piece of software I’m actually vaguely familiar with on the Mac that I have some respect for is the IRC client Colloquy. One thing that is cool about Colloquy is that when someone posts a link to an image, Colloquy displays it right in the conversation window. It retrieves the image and displays it embedded in the conversation where it was brought up. Wouldn’t it be cool to do that in the mailing list posts? I think so. Especially for design-team posts

#16 User Post Quality Report

Mailing lists as a self-improvement tool…? Heh. Why not? It could be cool to get an understanding of how you come off on mailing lists with suggestions on how to be a more productive participant, no? Here’s a vague idea of how it might work. You could get a grade letter (in the thumbnail sketch, this person has a ‘D’), with details on what gave you the score – how many people disliked your posts vs. how many people liked your posts, how many flamewars you have been involved of relative to the average number other people on the list have been, how many high rated posts you have… If you’re well-known for flaming and people generally dislike what you write, maybe the system could recommend that you try being nicer, and provide links for mailing list etiquette guides. Maybe? I don’t know. This is another one that has a risk of being creepy. But I’d rather have a computer or automated system tell me I’m an asshole and fix that before a person I really respect does.

What do you think?

Well, that’s 16 ideas. I have 16 more. I’ll post them in a separate post so as to not overwhelm here. Check them out here.

What do you think?

• Presenter: David Baron, Mozilla (@davidbaron)
• Slides: http://dbaron.org/talks
• SXSW Synopsis: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12909

Introduction

I want to talk about the main pipeline from markup to graphics in web browsers: how they handle HTML and CSS, through this rendering path, to the screen. I will not talk about specific techniques or interaction with the network (resource loading).There’s better information about that out there.

I’ll talk about how you can experiment for yourself to see what’s fast or slow, but I won’t talk about practical application.

I can tell you about Gecko and Webkit, but we know nothing about Internet Explorer and Opera because they are not open source. We expect them to be reasonably similar, but it’s a guess.

The core I’ll talk about is the pipeline from markup to graphics – html, svg, css – from being a file you get off the ntework, to being a tree represented in memory, to be another data structure that represents layout, to be something drawn on the screen.

High Level Overview of rendering a static page

HTML and other markup languages are just a serialization of a tree structure. The job of the parser is to do that conversion. Differnet browsers invent different terminology, so we have three names for everything. Sometimes this is called DOM tree, sometimes called content tree.

Elements, documents, tree nodes. Elements can be html or SVG, and also can be distinguished as what they are.

After we have the DOM tree, we then want to use some other input. CSS as input to construct the sceond tree structure (Rendering tree / Frame Tree in Gecko / the Bos tree in CSS), which is similar to the dom tree, but different in a lot of ways.

This second tree (the renering tree) describes position. In a series of rectangles. Similar to content tree, but might not map one-to-one. Maybe something isn’t rendered because it’s invisible. so on and so forth. The categorization of the nodes in the content tree is based on the markup language. The categorization of things in the rendering tree is based on the CSS rules, or form controls, or other display types (e.g. SVG). I’m lumping selector matching and computing style into the process of building the rendering tree.

What we have to do next is compute the positions based on what is in the rendering tree. The process is called layout or reflow. Once we’ve done that, we can paint them to a 2-D graphics API.

Optimization

A lot of pages today aren’t static. They are dynamic – they change the dom, they change styles, etc. I want to focus on how the browser responds to those dynamic changes. If the page changes the DOM, doing all these things over again in response is completely unoptimized, and won’t work. We can’t keep up with the user typing, for example, if every keypress requires a full run of the process again. We can’t keep up with that. You want the page to respond quickly.

(The arrows represented when the full process is skipped for various reasons explained below)

I’m going to talk about the types of optimizations the browser makes. I’ll split them in three broad groups:

• Skip entire steps of process in response to some change – if we know we don’t need to do it, skipping them is the best
• Skip part of a step – we might layout part of a page, or reconstruct the rendering tree for just a part of the page instead of the whole page. If the DOM is changed in one limited place, the browser won’t throw the whole thing away if the rendering tree has to change. Just the part that needs to be reconstructed.
• Coalesce changes – in other words, the page can do a whole series of things, each alone would require redoing a lot of work. The browser won’t redo the work until it really needs to do that.

Caveats here: optimizations vary across browsers. Browsers handle content more uniformly across browsers than how they optimize, which varies more widely. Since browsers behave differnetly, a single browser can change how they optimize things. We always try to make things faster, nbut that won’t always be the case. Optimizations can and do change. Sometimes we’ll optimize for a particular set of cases, and that slows other downs.

I’m going to separate out two of the pieces from the previous diagram. Computing style (selector matching) and construct frames (building rendering / frame tree). I’ve separated selector matching in CSS from constructing frames in the frame tree.

If we set a non-presentational attribute, we have to figure out if the presentation has to be changed at all. If there is no way the change wil affect the presentation, we’ll skip that. If there is a selector in the stylesheet that selects on that stylesheet, we’ll have to re-run selector matching. Maybe we haven’t changed the set of selectors that match – we look to see if this single element matches – that is not the same as doing it for the whole document. Maybe this div isn’t in an element with id list, nothign changed, we leave again.

Properties that require us to reconstruct the rendering tree:

• Display
• position
• float (from/to ‘none’)
• transform (from/to ‘none’
• column-*
• counter-*
• quotes

The last three aren’t used all that often, so we don’t worry about optimizing them that carefully. We use a slow code path there, because there hasn’t been a need to optimize it.

Properties we don’t need to reconstruct nodes in the rendering tree for, but we need to recompute positions and sizes again (reflow / lay out):

• width
• height
• font-*
• margin-*
• padding-*
• border-*-width
• letter-spacing
• word-spacing
• line-height

Properties where we don’t have to re-do layout:

• color
• background-*
• border-*-color
• z-index

Or maybe nothing changed with the new selector match. Mouse moved onto paragraph, changes yellow, but it was already yellow: we do nothing.

Properties that have custom optimizations:

• transform – we could handle changes to this by doing re-layout. Authors really care about the performance for this property, so it has its own custom code path. It has its own handling because we want it to be fast.
• cursor – none of these paths would handle a change in cursor. We have to look and see if the mouse pointer is actually in the element, 5-10 lines of code – custom because the other code paths don’t handle this.

Coalescing

Authors might change the same element twice. For example, if position is changed, then overflow right afterwards, we want to buffer it up and make the change once rather than redo the render tree all over again. Changing an elements parent affects the child – merge them into one repaint.

So when do we make the changes we’ve buffered up?

• It’s time to redraw. Monitor refresh rates are 60-70 hertz. No point for the browser to redraw faster than the monitor is refreshing. Wasting CPU on something the user will never see. Browser tries to maintain a refresh rate similar to typical monitor refresh rates.
• If script asks for something that requires processing those changes. The web programming model is based on the appearance that everything happens instantly. We have to act like it happens instantly, so if the author asks for a position or a size or style (via a script), we have to go flush those changes to give them the right answer.

Browsers can differ in how they flush this buffer. We have a set of things that flush the construction of the rendering tree. There is nothing that requires that – it could be that there are things that flush style only or flush layout only. In gecko we have things that flush everything.

Calling getcomputedStyle, etc. if it tells you where an elements is or how big it is, it will flush the layout buffer.

Don’t defeat all the optimizations that we do. It’s very easy to write a loop that changes something, then asks for something for us to flush those buffers. We’ll have to run everything through the loop as a result, and this will be very expensive.

DONT DO THIS
(pseudo code)
loop (i < n; n++) {
set style for an object, get offsetheight, and change it
}

This can make pages orders of magnitudes slower. We hope to have better debugging tools to detect this sort of problem in the future. You can miss this because things like this are hidden in frameworks. There are some JQuery plugins that do this, for example.

Skipping parts of these operations

We can skip a part of the process. We can reconstruct part of the rendering tree for example. The performance characteristics are different for each one. Reconstructing rendering tree is simplest of the 3. Reconstructing a node means reconstructing all of its descendents in Gecko. If you force a recontruct on the body element, you’re reconstructing the entire tree. There is a tiny cost resulting from the depth of the tree it’s in. A node that is 200 nodes deep, has a measurable cost. Otherwise cost is proportional to the number of things you’re constructing.

You might want to measure how expensive this is.

(script to test it / skipping part of the frame construction / rendering tree construction)

It does exactly what I told you not to do, it flushes the buffer constantly; then I time how long it takes.

Skipping part of the process… something in the layout moving aronud / changes, affects the rest of the page. The process of doing layout always starts at the very top of the tree and propagates down to what needs to be changed. In some cases, this can be simple. A bunch of divs, will lay out their contents, maybe they’ll be taller, push down some siblings. A change inside of a table, might cause the widths of the columns to rebalance and cause the entire table to relayout. So the cost of the surroundings affects the cost of relayout. Experiment with surroundings.

Recomputing instrinsic widths is slightly separate; basically there’s two different phases to doing layout. The first doesn’t happen all the time. A lot of CSS concepts that rely on instrinsic width. The larger width is for the text on one line only, the smaller, the width of the smallest unbreakable text. Every element doesn’t have those intrinsic widths, so we build this up. Tables also have intrinsic widths. Recomputing those is separate from redoing layout, because some properties that require recomputing layout require recomputing intrinsic widths, some don’t.

flush layout function in preso – this can measure how expensive a structure is, in terms of layout. You can experiment with the structure content is inside, and the content itself.

Painting is a bit different. We’ve been talking about subtrees and nodes in a tree. Repainting isn’t involved with nodes; we’re repainting rectangles or a set of rectangles. There’s no mechanism to flush painting. There are ways to spot very bad cases: in some browsers, you might see slow repaints if you switch tabs back and forth or uncover a window – that will vary depending on browser and OS graphics handling, and only happens in very bad cases. There are some debugging tools that let you see what’ s getting repainted. In nightly builds of firefox, we have a hidden preference in about:config that lets you have the browser flash everytime it starts repainting so you’ll know when it’s happening. We’re working right now to optimize repainting in Firefox. Soon we’re hoping to have major improvements in what gets repainted.

Other resources:

• A useful API: window.requestAnimationFrame – you write pages that update things based on a timeout, and you’re guessing what the right timeout is. If you can hook into the browser’s refresh cycle, you can hook in and animate as smoothly as possible.
• If you want to hear about faster page loading, http://stevesouders.com has great information about making sites load quickly.

Questions:

Does the browser refresh rate reflect canvas refresh rates, 2D or GL?

You can paint to a canvas whenever you want, but browser refresh rate affects when it gets redrawn to screen. At least for 2D. Basically, you can still update the canvas whenever but we’ll only refresh at certain points.

As a developer really trying to optimize experiences: can you provide context for benefits of optimizing for these things vs. optimizing for latency in networking / http requests?

Depends on what you’re trying to do. Building documents, or building applications? In the world of building apps, I think worth optimizing for both. Which perf characteristics are you having the worst problems with? Depending on what you need to optimize, one or the other might be better.

If you can compare a couple of browsers – chrome, safari, IE – do you know what optimizations they are using? Also, desktop vs. mobile – how do the optimization tactics differ?

In terms of comparing browsers, I’m not sure how well-qualified I am to answer that. I know a lot about gecko, a little about webkit, not much about anything else. It’s really hard for me to say.

Mobile vs. desktop – I think a lot of the optimizations are going to be the same. Mobile browsers are built on the same engines desktop brwosers are. Optimizations might be more important on mobile – need to delay refresh rate, but probably not huge differences.

I need to do an engineering preparser of our styles because of a component model that only serves styles associated with a compnent that happens to be on the page… I’m forced to use very hyper-specific selector chains… as many as 6-8 deep in specificity. Can you talk about how selectors are parsed, maybe optimizations – how expensive is that, in terms of drawing to the browser?

You’re working with a component system that requires you to serve stylesheets… underlying question is about the performance of selectors, that are very long with a lot of combinators. I think the fundamental thing about selector matching is that they are matched from right to left. We do it when we’re constructing a node in the rendering tree. We do it as part of the process of finding the selectors that match a specific node. Here is a selector, find the parts that match it. The most important thing about selector perforamnce, it’s going to be faster the sooner it fails. The more time you have to search for something that matches, the more time you have to spend trying to find that selector. There have been some recent optimizations to selector matching. If the rightmost part, after the last space or last child selector is as specific as possible – if that fails, you never have to look for siblings, etc. so it’s faster. That advice is changing a little bit. Webkit landed optimizations that filters out some sets of selectors before that point.

Testing a piece of code for performance issues, useful, thank you. Printf debugging to finding performance issues to using an actual profiler – do you know of any tools, instead of testing a specific code – could the tool do general perforamnce profiling across a poorly performing site?

I don’t know of anything right now. I’m hoping that tools that are good for profiling these aspects of layout will exist in the near future. There may be some I don’t know about right onw, I can’t recommend anything.

Do you have any lists of guidelines or checklists of things to look for?

One of the top guidelines is to try to avoid breaking the coalescing optimizations. I don’t have any good lists off the top of my head. There’s a number of pages that exist about selector matching performance optimization .

Accomplishing the same layout several different ways – are there performance benefits, or does it not matter?

The simple answer is yes, but I don’t think that’s useful to say. I think in general it’s often features perform better when they are used for what they were designed for. It’s common to do layouts using floats, but they weren’t really designed for that. They were designed for pulling things out of the flow rather than for the entire layout of the page. In some cases their perf characteristics aren’t hat great. Sometimes they lead to excessive repaints, we are hoping to fix that soon. I’d hesitate to advise for or against any specific thing based on perf alone, because there are ways – once you’ve chosen one concept, there are ways to improve any problems you might run into. Tables have their own set of performance problems, but part of the point of these layout systems, is that the browser is supposed to do the work for you. If you do all the work yoursel fin a script to avoid taxing the browser, you may end up doing it slower than the browser can do.

The Potion for Motion: Interactive Interfaces / Apps

• Dan Simpkins – CEO of Hillcrest Labs
• SXSW Schedule Entry / Synopsis

2005, Hillcrest developed ‘Home’, the first TV interface for motion. Innovation is a good thing, but it can create confusion.

Products that benefit from motion:

• smart tvs
• mobile devices
• game consoles
• set top boxes
• pc peripherals

Motion sensors are becoming more commonplace. Every smartphone has an accelerometer, for example. Marketing has caused some confusion, so I’ll clear it up.

What is motion?

(Shows a photo of a man pointing.)
Nautral motion, gesture, control knobs, pointing

An equal number of you said this is a gesture, and an equal number said it is pointing. This is a key misperception. Motion is more than gestures.

(Shows a photo of a woman running.) Not a gesture. Natural motion.

(Shows Spock’s ‘V’ gesture.) A gesture.

Motion is more than gesture. Using “gestures” to mean all motion is an oversimplification. No more than 5-7 gestures is easy to learn in an interface. There are probably only 5-7 on your smart phone. Swipe up, zoom in/out. Gestures require a lot more system performance and processing to account for the gesture and human variations, which makes it more complex for the system to understand.

• natural motion
• pointing, cursor control
• virtual controls
• gestures

Walking, running, hitting a ball – all natural motions. Pointing is a specific motion we identify at an early age. Before you’re 11 months old, you learn how to point to indicate simple interest or selection. Pointing is not a gesture per se, it’s a complex mode of motion that is distinct from the others.

Virtual controls are an interesting way to interact. Today in more advanced interfaces, with higher processing capability, linear functions like volume and fader are still relevant to be controlled by virtual controls.

How to add motion to a product: start by defining the problem.

• What is the primary function? What’s the priority? What comes first?
• What are the use cases? Are you trying to do gaming? A health interface? A television UI?
• Who is the target customer? If the customer is an enterprise or business user, it’s very different if the customer is a consumer looking for entertainment. A good example of this is the Blackberry: had a keyboard, and tuned to enterprises. Trade-off between efficiency and ease-of-use. Blackberry was tuned to efficiency, and had to be learned. The iphone touch interface is more inefficient, but it ended up being easier across a wide range of applications and for the general consumer.
• How much should it cost? If it’s a consumer product that has to cost under $100, motion sensor has to be small part of cost. If you have a larger target price, you can do more motion.
• Where will we sell it?
• When do we need to ship it?

Remote control device design could be done independent of the device itself. The remote control design typically is done by a different department than the one that designs the TV. This is not a good model for development of motion interaction.

Motion control is part of a system.

Humans are a system. A complex system with sensors. When you add motion control to a technology product, you necessarily make it complex.

Sensor detects human – motion sensor or optical sensor – then it has to process that motion, determine what action the UI has to do based on that. Then, the human observes the interface change on screen, and processes it. That closed loop has to happen roughly 25 times in a minutes, or 40 ms or less. If you’ve used kinect or other emergent motion interfaces, the system responds a little sluggishly. We call that control by a piece of spaghetti – if the delay is too much, interface is sluggish and it isn’t real time.

Critical Design Factors for Motion

1. Performance of sensors (cost a significant driver; 3D camera more expensive than inertia system) Sensitivity, drift, non-linearity, aging
2. System responsiveness – latency, wake-up time, gain settings. If you had to move your mouse a distance equivalent to how much it moves on screen, if you have a large screen, it would be very fatiguing.
3. User control – accuracy, orientation free, tremor. Humans have tremor naturally, and we all have a different tremor signature. To create an accurate experience, you have to remove the unintended motions, and only translate the intended motion.
4. Cost – BOM, integration, support

History of Natural UI innovation

He founded Hillcrest Labs 10 years ago, with the goal of using new technology for the control of television UIs. 2003-2008, they developed on of the first OSes from the ground up to use natural motion and pointing interfaces to control platforms. Worked with Roku and LG on motion interfaces most recently.

More context

Televisions have traditionally used 50-button remote controls for their television. We’re hoping that will go way down in the next few years. The remote controls have made television a complicated platform when it is intended to be extremely simply.

The evolution of TV from ‘dumb’ 1939-2009, to ‘smart’, 2009 on (introduced by Samsung). It started out with just a few channels, limited to video and audio. Bumped up number of channels with cable and satellite. Now, with the internet, we can change the nature of television with so many more content sources.

Is SmartTV really smart? Smart can mean elegant. Matthew May, “In Search of Elegance: Why the best ideas have something missing.” His premise: something is smart or elegant if it solves a problem in a particular away. A simple solution to a simple problem, not elegant. If it’s a complex solution to a complex problem, it’s not elegant. A simple solution to a complex problem is elegant. I found that the smart TVs are a complex solution to a complex problem: smart TV tried to be a nexus between broadcast, broadband, and personal media. Their remote controls have gotten worse than the 50 button remote controls. Google TV has a 90-button remote control: this is going the wrong way.

When Google started to launch, and Samsung had already launched, we surveyed users and the literature. Consumers complained Google TV was too complicated. Wall Street Journal called it a geek product, not mainstream. “A confusing UI nightmare,” “too complex,” on and on. We were not creating elegance.

Recommends “The Laws of Simplicity,” John Maeda. He talked about interfaces in the same way Matthew May did. “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and keeping the meaningful.” So we asked, what was obvious about the TV remote control? It was designed to be incredibly for anybody to use: anybody can push a button. 4 buttons: north, south, east, west. A focused state interface – easy, but not efficient: how many control elements can you put on screen? With HD TVs with more pixels, you can fill every pixel, but with up, down, left, right, you’re going to have to hit the button an extreme number of times.

We decided Smart TV needs a natural UI. Why can’t I point at which album I want, which movie I want? We decided the change would be dramatic if we could bring pointing to the screen. Why does it have to be a square box with 50 buttons? If up / down / left / right go away, what happens? Remote control, every time you want a new function, it’s a new button. But you’re supposed to be watching the TV, not looking down at the remote. Why do I have to look down to find pause?

We subtracted the obvious: we took all buttons off except for a few. Select, back, scroll wheel. I’ll show you videos of this in action. Our perspective is to subtract the obvious, subtract the buttons. Add meaningful: pointing and dynamic control.

The evolution of the TV Human Interface

1. Natural – only a few buttons, you point primarily
2. Elegant – don’t bring the pc or smart phone to the television. Make the design relevant to the experience. In the GUI, we subtracted menus and made them relevant.
3. Fluid – seamless flow from page to page. Our brains are wired to form mental maps of our spatial environment with motion cues – so why do apps flashcut from one content type to another without a fluid dynamic motion map / a spatial navigation of our content environment?

1. TV is about video first, but must help users find, consume, use content and apps.
2. TV is not a PC: entertainment, not productivity
3. TV is a “Lean Back” experience – TV should do most of the work to present things to me. Find, graze, browse. Seamless search tool to find what I want if I know exactly what I want. If I know generally what I want: a drama, an action flick: that should be possible. If I want to browse, I should be able to traverse large amounts of content as well, as much in a short period of time.

Use cases to take advantage of natural motion interface

• Group of friends watching a soccer. Beers, food. Pizza delivery guy arrives. They have to find the remote to pause it. He has to put his beer down if he’s picking up a keyboard to use both hands.
• Watching movie on a date. Door bell rings, have to put movie on pause. Pick up smart TV remote. Touchscreen, buttons: have to fumble to find pause. Prefer not to do this. One-handed operation is smart to hug wife with other arm.

They did years of laboratory research and found that natural motion interfaces based on pointing via inertial control is an excellent choice.

Their device has accelerometers and gyroscopes. You don’t have to look at the device, just wiggle it around. Idea of an air mouse has been around, nothing new. This device… I hold my arm out and it keeps the cursor dead still – not possible with a laser pointer. It dynamically removes human tremor; lets me control a single pixel on an HD Screen; can distinguish between intended and unintended motion. If he turns the device on its side, goes up / down / right / left: up is always up, you don’t have to worry about which way its up on the device.

Camera based systems have to be line-of-sight, and they have to see you. Having a device that can be under a blanket is better. Voice is also an interesting application, but one tool is not the answer.

Maslow’s Hammer: the golden hammer. If you are a hammer, you see all the world as a nail. Really important to avoid this. We come up with a new application: iphone, Siri, Wii. Avoid temptation to use one solution or approach to all the problems.

The integrated natural interface: think of it as a table setting. There’s generally more than one utensil: a fork, the knife, the spoon.

• The fork – a handheld motion remote – the workhorse.
• The knife – voice input – efficient for a particular function. Text and navigation.
• The spoon – the camera – special applications like skype and gaming.

When you design a new user interface, you should think about using all the utensils and use them in the right way.

Summary

Digital Media Industry Priorities

• A natural inteface that supports find, graze, and browse of content and apps.
• Want it to be elegant
• Want it to be fluid.

This can be applied to a wide range of applications, not just entertainment. Military, robotics, industrial, mobile – all can benefit from natural motion.

Natural motion will transform UIs:

• Motion encompasses more than just gestures
• It makes interactions more efficient and more natural
• It is more fun to use than existing button-based interfaces

Adding natural motion to products is not easy

• It is a systems problem
• The systems issues are often not related to physics but psychology
• Optimized use of motion requires a good device and UI.

Hillcrest Labs can help

• We already sovled the systems problems
• We designed end-to-end systems using motion for 8+ years
• Our team can guide you and make you a success


Questions:

When is this kind of interface wholly inappropriate?

• Camera interfaces generally inappropriate for lean back control. I don’t want to wave my hands around from the couch. If the number of commands exceeds 5-7, you can’t learn the interface, stay away from gestures.
• In the operating room, sterile environments – a challenge to have these sensors.
• Harsh environments – sensors need to be more robust.

Is the lean back experience changing? Lean back in some contexts, lean forward social experience in others…? How do you apply some of the things you’ve talked about to multi-screen experiences?

TV is still a central experience: a group or a community experience. But you want to do some things personally. Maybe you want to look up about the actress on your tablet, not up on the central screen. Or maybe you want to text someone about the show without disturbing everyone else watching. Ultimately, TV is about sitting back and watching the movie. If you want to change the volume or put it on pause quick – those behaviors have to be very simple. I think we’ll see other devices overlaid on top of this natural system to augment the experience, create new forms of lean forward activities during the lean back experience.

We think about the separation between personal and community. Personal may be more lean forward.

Update: Xanthe has posted a blog post on this talk. Please check it out:

Why Are We Here?

(From the SXSW Program)

Open source communities pride themselves on the premise of egalitarian communication where every voice is valued, heard and documented. Despite this noble goal, this panel discusses how women and their communication style might nevertheless result in their marginalization or deter them from participating in open source communities in the first place.

This dual presentation, moderated by a journalist, brings together two women with different perspectives and experiences working in open source communities. Together they will discuss how the marginalization of women in open source affects process and product outcomes, particularly with regard to design. We will also discuss strategies to improve participation in open source communities both from an industry and educational perspective. We look forward to starting a conversation about problems with, and solutions for, working in open source communities.
To make this dual conversation engaging and interactive, it will take questions from the crowd and ask for examples/testimonials from men and women about gendered communication in open source communities.

The Panelists

• Andrea Hickerson Moderator, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Xanthe Matychak, Lecturer, College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Máírín Duffy, Interaction Designer, Fedora & Red Hat

Resources

Mentorship

• Open Hatch
• GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach Program
• Google Summer of Code Program Mentors List
• Google Summer of Code

Women in Open Source & Technology

• Ada Initiative (adainitiative.org)
• Geek Feminism Blog (geekfeminism.org)
• Geek Feminism Wiki (geekfeminism.wikia.com)
• LISA ’11 Boston: Women in Tech Panel notes
• Women in free software: Recommendations from the Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus

(New) Breaking Into Open Source

• Open Advice: What we wish we knew when we had started Ed. Lydia Pintscher, CC-licensed book with tons of useful info on how to get started as a new open source contributor.

Culture

• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain – her TED talk is fantastic, too.
• The Power of Vulnerability TED talk by Brené Brown.

People to Follow

• Selena Deckelmann
• Valerie Aurora
• Deb Nicholson
• Alex “Skud” Bayley
• Rikki Endsley
• Marina Zhurakhinskaya
• Jessica McKellar
• A list of even more!

Hello there! I’m at SXSW (South By Southwest) 2012 this weekend, going to the interactive conference. I’m also on a panel called Binary Bitches: Keeping Open Source Open to Women with RIT professor Andrea Hickerson and RIT design thinking lecturer Xanthe Matychak. If you are at SXSW and interested in free / open source software, you should drop by and say hi. It’s tomorrow at 5.

Anyway, I tend to take copious notes when I go to talks. I thought they might be useful to a wider audience, so here you go.

Design from the Gut: Dangerous or Differentiator?

Session Description:

(From the SXSW 2012 schedule)

The internet is a never-ending data source. Through it we are able to monitor visitor activity, study traffic patterns, and use these analytics to help guide users in the directions we want. Usability testing gives us behavioral information which can either affirm design decisions or inform necessary changes. Research and analytics go a long way in selling a creative direction to clients who are focused on engaging with their customers and in how marketing dollars will impact their bottom line.

But what about a designer’s instinct—that moment when a designer just knows what they’re building is right? When and how do their years of professional experience, inspirational collections, and life observations become deciding factors?

Learn from a panel of design veterans, with experience that ranges from client services to product development, about past experiences and their personal stance on the subject.

Panelists:

• Jane Leibrock User Experience Researcher, Facebook
• Laurel Hechanova Designer & Illustrator, Apocalypse OK
• Naz Hamid Founder of Weightshift, design studio in San Francisco
• Phil Coffman Creative Director at Element (in Austin)
• Bill Couch Software Engineer, Twitter (formerly of USA Today)

Session Twitter Feeds:

(Attendees could ask questions via Twitter)

• @dftg on Twitter
• #SXfromthegut
• #fromthegut

Session website:

The panelists set up a website:
http://designfromthegut.com/

Notes:

What is designing from the gut?

Naz >

Watched Ed Speakerman talk at TED. Sometimes he design typefaces – sometimes he’ll design the whole thing out, no research… then backtrack, tell the story of why he did it that way, after the fact. At the time I’ve done that in projects before – you just design something based on what you’ve done or what you feel for the client / project at ahnd. There’s other factors that go into why sometimes that tends to happen – quick turnaround or small budget or budgets that don’t allow for longer user research period – but I think that’s pretty common. You just know it. You feel it in your bones, that you designed something great. That’s what I think designing for the gut it.

Laurel >

Gut is a weird concept if you’re a professional, because you keep up with best practices, and your peers in the industry. Gut is smarter than a lot of people’s research, so designing from Eric Speakerman’s gut is more informed than I think maybe… “Gut” for him has a different connotation.

Naz >

Gut is really experience. It’s informed by everything you’ve done.

(Phil) So if you’re just getting started, you’re a beginner, what do you do? Things you’ve seen and been influenced by, that steered you towards being a designer – what do you do?

Laurel >

It’s like learning an instrument. You start listening to the bands you like, listen to their songs… Initially maybe you mimic your hero’s designs a little to closely; over time you develop your own style. Listening to your gut while you’re still learning is probably a good way to balance it out.

(Phil) Analytical data / usability research vs the gut. Does one ever trump the other? Does this change during the phases of the project? Is there a logical time one makes more sense than another?

Bill >

Definitely times where one is better than the other. More and more devices are coming out now, technology changing so fast. He was at USA Today, was fortunate to work on the iphone/ipad apps. It did well, they wanted to be involved in ipad after iphone – contacted apple and got in touch with them about creating an app for ipad. But we had never seen or touched or played with one – designing for a device you’ve never worked with before is difficult. We had the devices, but they were chained into a windowless section of the office, could not take it into any context the devices would be used in. We had to make paper prototypes, discuss theoretical scenarios, had to explore knowing the features that existed. We spent a lot of time thinking about and iterating on actual prototypes for the device. Would you simulate a page turn or some other interaction to allow for navigation? It was a really crazy moment of experimentation but it was all based on what we thought made sense. We had no idea what anybody else was going to do…. I believe everyone was in a similar position that we were. We could see how it all played out after the device came out. Definitely want to focus on gut vs research depending on how much you know about the tech.

Jane >

People think research comes in later on. I try to get UX research involved early on. Early formative research in coming up with ideas for products, before designing or coding. I tend to do a lot up front… first or second iteration is when people are itching to do usability test… right of the top of my head, my gut, what i know about ux… usability best practices – we could probably shop something around internally and make it better and clean it up before bringing users into the lab. Iterate before you bring users in and do formal research.

(Naz) There’s different types of research, low level, just checking in on things with a small group. Even over skype – it’s like a gut check – what do you think of this? How does that scale? How do you make that scale?

Naz>

When you take… say a photoshop comp… hey Bill, check this out. Phil, check this out. You’re doing a redesign and you want to get feedback from your best friends / colleagues – is that enough? Does that scale? Does it have to go on bigger than that? What is the sample size that is useful?

Phil >

I do that all the time. I don’t give context. I show them a jpg – what do you think? I built this core – your trusted friends – cull it down to people who you know are going to be on the same level you’re at, same kind of journey in professional career… or they provide really valuable feedback. I’ve never really felt the need to go beyond my core circle. I’m not working for a massive product company. I work for a small shop with 4 people. I’ve never sat in on a usability test in a room where I’ve showed my work and had someone do it. I see the value in it but my projects never had the budget or time to fit that in. Relying on my core knit group of folks up to this point has always been okay.

(Naz) How do you do this [user research] without budget?

Jane >

Refining design consulting other designs… getting near the end of the process, you need to bring in users. Make sure it makes sense for their context / life experience. If you do one round of usability with 5 or 6 people, you’ll catch the major problems right them. It’s time to fix those problems, then do a second round.

Laurel >

There’s a danger in asking your friends, if they are in your industry. They’ll catch kerning issues, surface-level design flaws. You should ask your grand-dad, the guy washing your car… get new perspectives [for the bigger picture].

Bill >

As a gut check we’ll do a handful of tests at Twitter to see what makes sense, what doesn’t. We’ll release something to employees only to get a sense for whether or not it works, how it feels. We extend out beyond that… as many people as you need to discover issues.

Jane >

You could test just 2-3 people, and if everyone got that wrong, or if nobody saw that button, you’ll know.

Laurel >

When the experience is the entire product, testing and research more important. If it’s a means to an end, ecommerce or selling t-shirts… the t-shirt is the product. The website is part of the experience but testing that experience is maybe less important than if you’re trying to build a to-do app, or the app interaction is going to be more difficult than interacting at storefront.

(Naz) If you don’t design from the gut at all, is it still possible to create something beautiful?

Jane >

I don’t think that’s possible

Laurel >

You’re not a machine. Your decisions… everything is tainted… you are a filter for whatever you decide.

Phil >

I could have all this data, but I really don’t have the time to cull through it. You have to make decisions on the fly. You are relying on your gut when you do that. The creative process is not linear, it ebbs and flows, so you have to hit a rhythm and start relying on your experience… maybe you have to pull in the thing you know worked in the last project. Ut can be a time issue… something flares up and you’ve got to put out a fire. You come back – sitting down and going through the data, it’s very valuable… time in my day really impacts how I actually end up doing what I do.

(Laurel) Is it possible to be irresponsible through overanalyzing? Blow the budget, etc.?

Phil >

Yes, data can keep coming. You could keep going through the data… could continue to analyze and talk away through it.

Jane >

it’s also possible to keep iterating based on data limitlessly. at facebook we are very analytical and data driven. we make a small change, look at metrics. if you are constantly doing little tweaks only, you’re not doing a full design…

Bill >

Even small percentages, when you work at a large scale, small changes results in a lot of people being affected. When we try to increase the numbers of users in Twitter, for example, we change something in the sign up flow that improves it 2%: that is thousands or tens of thousands of users.

If you ignore accessibility and screen readers… a small percentage of the total, but still a large number of people.

Scale comes into this.

Laurel >

While doing research for this – I think where to draw the line for research is kind of a gut decision.

(Naz) With endless data is there a point at which you have to pick a data point or to find a new data set?

Phil >

I have a lot of inner turmoil. Endless loop even if I’m designing from the gut. I can be fickle. Just pull out of it, look at the data, look at what the client’s trying to accomplish, look at some other products or companies that did something similar – look at the numbers, look at the data… use that as a factor. It’s such a personal and an emotional thing… unless you’re more stable than I am…

Another question – how much can… if you haven’t done the cold hard studies… if you’re looking at other sites – a client that says ‘it’s just like pinterest!’ if you use what they have done as your research – is that a good or bad thing?

(Phil) Is it a good thing or bad thing to study other sites if you don’t have research?

Jane >

That can work well if you know their users are similar to your users. Pinterest has a really neat interface, if you only want to copy it because its cool, and you don’t consider that it doesn’t work for your users, that’s a problem.

Naz >

Who in this room has heard ‘apple does it’ ‘facebook does it’ ‘twitter does it’ in a meeting?

It’s a form from taking someone else’s user research… looking at what their users do, but the audiences may not be the same.

Bill >

I wonder if you ride on what someone else has done – was it their intuition, or research? You can sometimes come into an echo chamber … oh, this place did it, we’ll do it. I’ve noticed – any interaction facebook puts in the iphone app… most installed app on the iphone… their menu to the left that slides other – now other apps have copied that. several iterations ago – used to be a sliderbar at the time, between news feed, sections, list… we were loking how to make our sections of paper scale, so we used that interaction since we thought it was a similar userbase.. thousands of people who would use both products. If we use that, people will be familiar with it because they used it before.

You know people are familiar because they’ve done it in other apps / websites so you use the same interaction pattern. Scrolling, parallax, is a very common trend. Is it something people know how to interact with from the get go…? Just because someone big did it, other people do it. Maybe not because research shows it makes sense.

(Bill) If you’re using other people’s research – how do you know if it’s based on research or intuition?

Naz >

I think you’ll see their success. You’ll see their results.

Bill >

But a lot of theses sites or apps iterate on these things. Whether or not it worked for them, they may be looking at alternatives to improve it or stay fresh. Did it work for them or not if they drop it?

(Naz) Gut design leads to innovation. You don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. How do you sell that to a team or client when other patterns are successful?

Phil >

It’s hard.

(Naz) There’s a point at which designers are going to be, ‘Well, I think it should just be this way.’ Fight it? Pull back?

Phil >

It’s different depending if you’re doing it internally vs selling to a client.

Internally… in some respects, if you’re doing it internally with your team, there’s a level of respect and you’ve worked together. If I’ve pitched an idea i think is new or fresh, I have a pre-existing relationship, seems like a good idea, we have a good history. You have to provide… you can’t just go in there and say ‘we need to do it this way.’

You still have to provide some basis for your decision. I think – even though you think it’s just from the gut – maybe you were looking at another site, got this idea, followed it this way.

I think it’s easier to sell internally. you could say ‘let’s just try it’ maybe do a quick prototype, see how it behaves.

With a client, it’s completely different. I used to run into the problem of going into a talk with a client, walk them top to bottom in a comp, explain all the cool design things I did in the comp – client doesn’t care. they want to know how it will effect their bottom line and what they are trying to accomplish. Without cold hard facts and data… you have to phrase it and word it in a way they will sponsor it. you gotta sell it… a lot of it at that point – a lot of what I’ve got here is what U know feels right. You can’t just go in there and say that. You have to know how to read the person…

(Naz) Is there a matter of… trust? What if the trust isn’t there, or what if they trust you and it doesn’t work, how do you recover? How do you build the trust in the first place?

Laurel >

Hopefully before you signed on to work with the client, you established that you were on the same page, you understand their objectives, you agree with their objectives, so that passion is there…

(Naz) What if it changes?

Laurel >

The design approach – give it to me, I want it – this is not the right way to approach it. You’re going to have to come up with reasons that would sell someone on it. If you lost your client’s trust – this is more like PR.. you need to talk to them. Figure out why you lost the trust in the first place. You may have undermined your foundation for doing design work totally.

Bill >

Internally, on trust, at twitter… a good question. I think… it’s certainly something as designs and concepts are developed and iterated on by our design team. people see them, they work with them, they find they work or don’t work. It’s how you develop that process. Do they take feedback? Do they work well with you? You establish a relationship that way. the relationship that is established becomes strong… you need the experience with them to build trust. A lot of times too, work will speak for itself. Also, do new iterations for new products… redesigned the Twitter site last December – you have to understand and develop that trust. iIhave a lot of trust in the design team and what they are going to do. You just establish a rapport there, I guess.

(Naz) When the data feels incorrect, or the gut feels incorrect, or the two don’t coincide. One or the other doesn’t match up. What do you do?

Jane >

What do you mean the data isn’t correct?

Naz >

Your perception of the data – small sample size, not enough data – making assumption about certain things, whether it’s the gut or data. you have two things at odds with each other.

Jane >

I think when data comes in, in some form, and it seems at odds with your gut, I don’t think the best reaction is to make a change based on the data. I think it’s a moment where you are missing some information. If you don’t know what that data means, go back and try to do more research. It’s a “reassess” moment, not make a change moment.

If you had a product prototyped, showed it to some users, and what came back was people that you thought would really like it didn’t like it: I think it is a signal that you don’t understand your users very well, so you should step back and go learn more about them before proceeding with the design.

Bill >

Relationship between designing from the gut, validating hypothesis, and actually shipping something.

For the sake of iteration, we’ll go with this, release it, see what happens. The web isn’t permanent. We’ll settle the disagreement that way. If you are in a position in a place where there is a lot of iteration, you can use that as a way to validate it.

We released the redesign last Dec of the site. A lot of intuition and gut for how to conceptualize the site for a really wide audience. Some of that works well for some people, for others it doesn’t. We used what came back from that to iterate. Make some of those bigger leaps and trust that things will work out for there to be any progress.

So that is where I think the line should be drawn, gut or research.

Jane >

Also the matter… you can test as much as you want with a large number of users, but you really don’t know what happens when it scales, so you just try it.

Bill >

We’ll use gut and imtuition for big conceptual stuff. We’ll use data for where to put timestamps, color, surface-level design things. Those are things where analytics come into play – that is fine-tuning… sometimes a composition looks good, makes sense… over sustained periods of time, larger companies like Facebook and Twitter, people who have used and passionate about the project, feel passionate against the change. Over the time of use… they’ll like it over time. If it doesn’t happen that way, you’ll seem long term trends, and you know something is wrong.

Phil >

Jane & Bill work for Facebook and Twitter. You are working on a product that you work on every single day, day in, day out. you have that laser focus…

Myself, and Laurel, we work on many different projects, can change widely depending on clients.

(Phil) Laurel, do you find that you have to rely on gut more because you don’t know what is coming next? Or are there enough patterns that there is always going to be something familiar, no matter what the product?

Laurel >

I never reinvent the wheel… all web apps. I’m not in entirely unfamiliar territory with each product. In that sense… no gut thing to the question. Nice thing about having different clients all the time is that you get to step outside of the role that they are immersed in. For example, I have two clients who are architects. I love architecture, but I’m not steeped in it, so the things they assume everybody knows, I get to tell them no – not everyone knows what that is. Not being familiar can mean you can give good feedback.

Naz >

You know, if you’ve got the sort of relationship where hopefully, let’s do this, this way, make sure whatever we are going to do is going to stand up to your measure of success for the project. There is a point at which you have to say, let’s dig deep, can we do the research? What do you know about your business? They may have analytics, they may have nothing. There are plenty of start-up clients who don’t even know how to gauge their clientele because it doesn’t exist yet or they are just starting out.

How do people use this thing? Client might not know who their users are. They might have an idea but… in the valley, there can be young startups that have a perception of who their users are, in the sense that they are 25-35, educated, income level… but that’s not a user. Do you really know who your user is?

Can you pull out a prototype before you build the actual thing? Parts of research – what kind of research do you do?

Phil >

Then the client’s gut comes into play, they may feel extremely strong about something. They are a start=up, other sites they’ve seen..

Naz >

When a startup or any new company comes to you and wants to hire you… you got to do the best job you can do, so it’s hard to ask the hard questions; they don’t want to hear it. We had clients we had to let go, irreconcilable differences. but you got to take a stand someplace. If it’s a gut thing, or they are just wrong. Well… I can’t bring this to market, I can’t help you do this. But if you have a good client, willing to learn it, open, hired you for the right reasons…

(Phil) What are the most surprising or counter-intuitive designs you’ve seen?

Phil >

Pushing the envelope… using your gut to spark innovation. Henry ford, ‘if i gave everyone what they wanted it would be a faster horse.’

Do you know of some examples that come to mind? Maybe it’s not just design from the gut – the whole idea of sparking innovation. What helps drive everything forward?

Naz >

One of the apps that came out recently was Path. Path has interesting UI bits… in the little corner, it springs out – not anything we’d seen. Once that launched, you ask – is that good? Is it useful? The labels are in a weird spot – is that good?

Another one – clear, the to-do app. Pulls down. Pull-down is notification center, that’s weird.

bill >

Path – everything is moments… one flowing interface… I think a lot of about the sort of design for long time archiving… Twitter is very much a product of short time I guess… flickr.. if you think about… instagram vs flickr, instagram for right now, Flickr is for long-term. Flickr is trying to really position itself for immediacy again. Scaling interfaces over time. These novel approaches that feel impressive when they first come out (Path, clear), has a lot of wow factor. But how do they age? Path is iterating – does it make sense, scannability reduced if timestamp moves if you’re looking at the person you are scrolling? Will those things work well over time? Maybe it does work well? But a lot of considerations to be made around these things over time.

Laurel >

Pull-down-to-refresh is my favorite example. I’m disappointed when an app doesn’t do that.

It was lauren richter (?) who designed it.

Bill >

I remember when that came out, it felt natural and intuitive, but also – is this a gimmick? will it age well?

it’s a hand repeating gesture, twitchy mode…

Laurel >

I think i accidentally discovered it. if people can happen upon it, then you are aligning with human instincts.

Bill >

have to design for human fallacy instead of machine

Laurel >

not everyone will pick up on vernacular / patterns.

(Phil) When does being right trump consistency?

Bill >

human interface guidelines for iphone… interfaces will continue to evolve. sometimes comes from fatigue from designers… this feels so tried and true, not exciting anymore. how do we make this exciting again? make it fresh?

exciting to see other people doing fun, crazy, creative things. not always best approach

Phil >

boring. i want to challenge myself. i don’t want to just go and copy patterns. It behooves you to do some research to riff off of. Challenge yourself. Ask yourself, ‘What’s another way I can do this?’

I’m currently working with a client who loves pinterest… it’s crazy. pinterest, everyone thinks they’ve created a classical rel-obj design… i like to challenge myself, it’s good to look at those things. when i start a project, i like to do that kind of self research, look at other sites doing similar things, similar audience – see how they solved those problems.

sometimes my approach won’t work, and pinterest is the best way to do it.

Question from the Audience on the design process

A good informed design process might be broken into stages. Research, designer work with research, then going back to users and analyzing. Can you give us insight into what that first stage looks like, what sources you go to, what does that research entail? I work for a digital/print publiciation. We have real time users, 100′s per second, we want to analyze that.

Jane >

Early stage of research is usually… talking about a new product. before you start thinking about a specific design too much or a specific technical approach, take time to learn about the users themselves, the users of this product. part comes from your gut – who is going to be the userbase for thse products.

go out and find those people. if you are interested in a certain area, look for people who are extreme in that area. interested in a messaging app? find people who engage in lots and lots of communication, find something from their extreme behavior and try to adapt from their behavior.

or try to find a specialist.

or look for a represenative group or two, embed yourself with them, following them in an ethnographic way, one-on-one interviews… the research will be very open-ended, here’s a product, how do you react to it? no. you want to understand their workflows, lifestyle, etc, and see how the product could fit.

(Laurel) From Megan on Twitter, what if your client wants to respect their gut more than your gut?

Laurel >

i think this goes back to making sure you’re on the same page all the way through. no way to reconcile that otherwise. ultimately, i’ll be totally honest, its their decision, they’re the client. their gut wins by default because they are paying money. If you can reason with them and convince them why their gut is wrong, maybe you can solve the problem.

(Laurel) What if you’re working internally?

Jane >

have to understand bosses gut

Bill >

engineers as one sort of client you’re working with, because they will ultimately be implementing. additionally have product managers who define the product and its vision, then you have the product team…

relationship isn’t always perfectly clean. trade-offs. need to be okay, settle things in various ways. over time, as things change…

difficult at a large scale, a lot of people who care about the product, invested in it… it can be a challenge but generally works out well

Naz >

Out of time, thanks everybody.

The Background Story

I come from a background strongly focused on communication; my Human-Computer Interaction masters’ degree was out of RPI’s Language, Literature, and Communication Department and my coursework was built on language, literature, and communication as a foundation to understanding newer digital communication methods. I may be biased, then, in thinking a lot of the angst (E.g., It’s Scary to Join an Open Source Project, Customer Support, The Simon Cowell Way, Channels for Community Communications) around getting things done in free software is coming to a crescendo because our tools for basic communication are not serving us well as we scale larger, and fixing that problem has massive potential to better the free software community.

Two years ago now (*sob*!) Luke Macken and I came up with some ideas for a web-based mailing list interface that would complement (not replace) mailing lists as they are today. We’re both pretty busy though and have had a ton of projects we needed to work on for our jobs, so neither of us have really done much with it since then. However, the post is one of the most widely-referenced and popular posts on my blog – maybe a good indicator of an idea worthy of time investment. Honestly, I really really want it to happen, and occasionally have wonderful dreams about it that make waking up to the reality of mailing lists a bummer.

A New Hope

So, over the past couple of weeks my team has been devising a plan for what we’ll work on over the next year, and fixing mailing lists made the cut!

I feel good…!!! by Lenora Enking on Flickr (Used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.)

So, expect to see some more mockups and workflows for a potential mailman archive web interface revamp, then. Pingou and Toshio are on-board as well and have started talking to Barry and the mailman developers who are in the planning stages right now of a revamped webui for list archives. We’re very early stages in discussion right now.

I recently joined the mailman-developers mailing list, joined #mailman on freenode, and set up a an area on the fedora-ux git repo to start throwing out UI ideas for it. I’ll make blog posts about this project under the Mailing List Improvements category.

Okay, Here’s Something to Look At

Click on it. It’s 7,750 pixels tall. Probably the longest mockup I’ve ever made. It’s really just a rough idea of what a view of a single, real-life fedora-devel thread might look like in a mailman web UI. There is nothing here that is wedded / married to anybody or anything, so please blow away. The visual design could stay or go. Maybe we could support different visual styles for different communities.

Please leave comments here in the blog comments if you’ve got any feedback / advice on this. Does it seem like something that would be natural to interact with? Here’s some notes on it with some questions for you, thanks to some good questions / comments on identi.ca, on Twitter (the thread is really broken on their webui though. Twitter: 0 Identi.ca: 1), and in #fedora-apps today:

• We waffled back and forth on this in IRC today, but I think we concluded what’s in the mockup is right: in the very top header, you click on the left-facing arrow to go to the next-newest thread, and the right-facing arrow to go to the next-oldest thread. You read a book from left-to-right, oldest content to newest content… but I think you read mailing list threads from newest-to-oldest. (Once within a thread, however, you read the messages from oldest-to-newest until you’ve caught up.) I think then, treating threads as newest-to-oldest is the right way, so the current mockup arrows / positions for navigating between threads make sense.
• Replies don’t have buttons to reply to them. Whoops. They need ‘em.
• Threads have a value. Potentially a category too. (The category in the mockup is ‘Question’) This value helps users figure out which threads to skip and which ones to pay attention to.
• Individual messages in a thread have a value. Think Slashdot. When you first go to Slashdot, troll-y messages with low moderation ranks are hidden from your view by default. A very interesting and insightful thread still might have some useless noise in it; giving individual messages in a thread each their own value will help filter the bad apples out.
• People have ranks. If Matthew Garrett posts a message detailing what you should do to fix your laptop, it’s a lot more authoritative and trustworthy than Binky the Clown telling you what he thinks you should do to your laptop in his debut list post. Serial trolls also have a rank – it’s not very high.
• There’s a lot of different ways to display a rank for a given concept (person, thread, post.)
  • Although Toshio and Pingou like YouTube’s ranking widget with bar graph, number of votes, and total vote count (example), it is a bit heavy for individual messages within a thread, so something lighter-weight should be chosen there.
  • There are a lot of different people-ranking systems. You could give folks a rank number, or a military-style rank with a title. Some forums have ‘stars’ you earn over time. We’re not sure what works best yet in a mailing list context.
• There are progress bars per thread for the number of participants and comments. These are meant to give you an idea how how ‘crowded’ and how busy a given thread is. E.g., if a thread has 500 people and 500 messages, it’s going to be flavoured a bit differently than a thread that has 2 people and 500 messages.
• There’s a little arrow in the upper-right notch of each comment. I was thinking that could be a drop-down menu for less-commonly used utilities like, ‘report as spam’ or ‘link to this comment.’
• The full date is only displayed in comments where the date changed between comments. Only the time is displayed if the comment was made the same day. (maybe weird? I didn’t want to clutter everything with a full date/time stamp on every single comment.)

On the Queue

Some ideas mockup-wise I’ve got in the queue to explore for this:

• A mockup to show a profile page for folks in the thread. It might talk a bit more about the stats that gave them their rank, and show their most-liked posts, and recent activity.
• For this single-thread view, a way towards the top of navigating straight down to particular sub-threads, and a way to jump back up to the main post. Maybe. I’ve been thinking about playing around with this.
• Again in the single-thread view, some kind of ‘hide all’ or ‘collapse’ for threads, or a more minimal (vertically) view.
• Again in the single-thread view, a mechanism to vote / change the category of the entire thread. Is this something admins only can do, or can individual users vote on this?
• Single-thread view again, display the mechanism for the thread’s rank itself (if needed; maybe the category is enough)
• Place this same exact thread in a variety of different ‘styles’ (Slashdot style, phpbb / classic forum style, Reddit style, Facebook style, etc.) to get a feel for how the same exact conversation feels differently in different UI arrangements.
• I’m sure more will shake from working on the above, and some of the above will turn out to be abandoned dead ends!

If you want to work with me on the mockups, you can grab the source files from my web checkout of the repo and you could even check stuff into the fedora-ux git repo if you’re a member of fedora-ux in the Fedora account system. (Let me know if you want to join)

lively conversation by Kai Schreiber on Flickr (Used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.)

Well, what do you think? Go nuts in the comments.

UPDATED
(Added a couple more variations on the mockup style to illustrate how we could provide different themes.)

Screenshot, front page of Fedora Packages

The story up ’till now

You might remember some earlier posts I’ve made about Fedora package social networking. The background here is that we built a web application called Fedora Community a couple of years ago. With Luya Tshimbalanga’s help, I ran a number of usability tests on this initial version at FUDcon Toronto. The results pointed out some key problems that over the past couple of years have definitely negatively impacted user adoption, including slow search and loading times.

Late this summer Luke Macken, John Palmieri, Spot, and myself went through those all of those issues and formulated a plan to try again and build a better application for package maintainers. We launched a beta version at FUDcon Blacksburg this past Saturday, and it’s called Fedora Packages.

We wanted to build only the most core functionality and keep things very light and speedy, being overly cautious towards adding features beyond the initial core to avoid the problems we ran into with the first version. I want to emphasize this because a lot of you provided great suggestions for functionality but we decided to focus just on the core functionality for now and have planned to work on several of your suggestions in future releases.

Fedora Packages

Screenshot, front page of Inkscape’s profile

You can think of Fedora Packages like a social networking system, where instead of profiles of people, you’ll find profiles of packages. We load the package’s icon in the upper left. Right now, we just load the icon if we have it, and if it’s too low-resolution, we blow it up. For some packages like clonekeen, this looks pretty awesome but for others, not so much. We very much appreciated your suggestions on an earlier blog post about package categories and how to display icons for packages that don’t have icons or high-quality icons, but again in keeping with our focus on the core and having something ready for you to check out by FUDcon Blacksburg, we decided to shelve that for now and focus on higher-priority features like optimizing our searches.

We also display basic details in the left sidebar such as like the latest version of the package in Fedora, the package owner, any packages in its family tree, and these pieces of information persist across the package’s profile tabs.

The front overview page shows the description of the package, what versions of the package are in what Fedora and/or EPEL releases, and a link to the upstream. I am hoping that in the next cut we can work with Vincent and the OpenSuSE folks on extending our upstream metadata; Luke has some ideas on this as well (more on that later.)

One core piece of functionality we definitely heard loud and clear from your feedback on Fedora Community, including during the FUDcon Toronto usability tests, was that the Fedora Community URL structure was complicated and made it difficult to go directly to the page you wanted. With Fedora packages, you need only append the name of the package you are interested in after the /packages/ portion of the URL and it will take you straight there. You can go directly to a particular tab of the package profile by appending the name of the tab after the package name portion of the URL (for example, https://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/packages/inkscape/bugs to go to the Inkscape bugs tab.)

Some new goodies: Patch Viewer and Contents Viewer

Fedora Packages’ patch viewer

You may recognize some of the tabs in Fedora Packages – both the builds and updates tabs are widgets Luke and J5 had built for Fedora Community. They have been cleaned up and optimized for inclusion here. We put some new goodies for you to work with as well.

Luke worked with me on the patch viewer, which not only gives you a full listing of all Fedora patches against any given patch with the committer and commit date, but also lets you view a diffstat per patch as well as across all patches for the package. You can also view the full content of the patches with code syntax highlighting inline in the page.

Expanded view on a patch from Fedora Packages’ patch viewer

J5 worked on the package contents tab, which displays the contents of the RPM binary for the package (see screenshot below.)

There are of course more nooks and crannies of useful information in each package profile: please try Fedora Packages out and let us know what you think!

http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/packages/

Inkscape’s contents tab in Fedora Packages

Optimized search via playing games: Fedora Tagger

Fedora Packages search results for ‘email’

So how did we get our search to work so quickly this time, and how are we getting better search results?

Luke did a lot of research on how to best improve our search and concluded that the GPL-licensed Xapian Open Source Search Engine Library was the way to do it. Xapian searches package names, summaries, descriptions, and tags, and it shold weight the search results in the following manner (although John is still tweaking it, and I’m not 100% sure where tags are in the ordering):

1. If the search term(s) appear in the package name.
2. If the search term(s) appear in the package tags.
3. If the search term(s) appear in the package summary.
4. If the search term(s) appear in the package description.

“Where do the tags come from, though?” you might ask. Good question! Fedora PackageDB has a tagging system and yum is able to access those tags, so Ralph Bean pre-populated the Xapian index with the tags from Fedora PackageDB. Not all packages in PackageDB have tags, though. What to do?

Fedora Tagger

Well, Spot had this great idea for us to build a game that would let you both add tags to packages in Fedora as well as vote up or down those tags added by others, and win points (and hopefully soon badges – more on that later) for your efforts. It was a stretch goal for us because we really weren’t sure if we’d have Fedora Packages up and running in a development environment and all the core features ready in time – time was very short, especially with the Christmas holiday break – but we managed to pull it together with J5′s initial javascript prototype and a Herculean effort by Ralph Bean, who not only got the basic game mechanics and prototype in tip-top shape but who also implemented gravatar icon support, a leader board, and even vim keybindings!

Other features include a naughty-words filter (no, Tagger is not a dumping ground for your drama ) and anonymous tag voting, although you can’t add tags if you are anonymous. Log in and try Tagger, and let us know what you think!

http://community.dev.fedoraproject.org/tagger/

Planning whiteboard for Fedora Packages and Fedora Tagger

Where we go from here

Our FUDcon presentation, “Making Fedora Package Maintenance Easier”, was (thankfully! phew!) given to a completely full room and the initial reception seemed to be very positive. Here’s a rundown of the comments and feedback we got during the session from those that attended:

Colin explaining his upstream package metadata ideas

• Would it be possible to show which patches were sent upstream and are pending, which were refused by upstream, and which have not yet been submitted? (Colin Walters & Nathaniel McCallum)
  • One proposed solution during the discussion was to create additional rules/regulations for package maintainers to note this information in their package commits. This was noted to be an extra burden on maintainers, though.
  • Another proposed solution that Luke has been looking into is called DOAP files.
  • Colin noted that he was upset when people fix bugs downstream in code he is the upstream for and don’t even let him know about it. He ends up putting time into fixing bugs that have already been fixed because he just didn’t know.
  • Both Nathaniel and Casey Dahlin noted that there is some functionality available in git where it can tell you if your lines of code from a patch is available in a given repo.
  • Nathaniel suggested adding something to the DOAP files, such that whenever someone builds a patch and commits it, it would automatically notify upstream. Spot noted that there are quite a few patches that are not suitable for upstream and wouldn’t be useful to them because they are Fedora-specific. He suggested noting the upstream contact on the page of each package. Ben Boeckel suggested that maybe Fedora-specific packages could start with numbers in the 1,000 range, but Spot thought the kernel maintainers wouldn’t like that very much.
  • Ben also mentioned an upstream version checker called ‘fever.’ Spot noted that Luke has been investigating its inclusion and it’s now called cnucnu. (More details on the Fedora wiki.)
• Cool, this is like extensions.gnome.org for Fedora! (Paul Frields)
  • It’s not a store, though (Spot)
  • With a few small tweaks–filtering down to apps only, and adding a install button–we could build a separate app like that using this codebase, though. (J5)
• What about screenshots? (Rahul Sundaram)
  • We don’t have auth on the site, so we couldn’t let users upload screenshots. (Spot)
  • Maybe we could set up a separate service to allow that. (J5)
• Can yum use the tags? Can other applications use the tags? (Kevin Fenzi)
  • Yum already uses tags from PackageDB … (lmacken)
  • Maybe we could get rid of the extraneous pkgdb stuff so we don’t have duplicate / separate functionality (Toshio)
  • What about using the tags in the package spec files? (Colin)
  • We could take the tag cloud that we generate… if the tag achieves a certain amount of weight, we could take those tags with those mappings and use in the GNOME shell search logistics.
• Is there a JSON API for this? (Casey Dahlin)
  • It’s definitely do-able since it’s built using TurboGears (lmacken)
  • Actually, I think it’s not documented yet but you could go to the connectors directory directly. (J5)
• Could we use this to better document specs? (Toshio)
  • Toshio had the idea of looking at adding the ability to annotate spec files. There was a project proposal to do this through the Google Summer of Code; the Django project documentation does it now, where you can comment on specific chunks/parts of the documentation rather than leave comments in a generic area. What if we added that ability to specs, so maintainers could document their specs when asked questions to new packagers they were mentoring? We could have a toggle to turn them on or off. The challenge is that we don’t have auth in Fedora Packages – maybe we could get around that by having the maintainer receive patches to the spec file with annotation via bugzilla?

Spot showing off Tagger

Some ideas we discussed adding, but have held back thus far because of our committment to implement the core first:

• Full package description text available in tagger – We noticed while playing Tagger that there were many packages we had never heard of and we opened up new browser tabs to do research on them in Fedora Packager. It would be more streamlined to display the package description and upstream link right in Tagger (upon request, after clicking ‘more details’) to save time and effort.
• Mozilla Badge Support – Mozilla’s Open Badges Project is something we could deploy to reward folks submitting tags and voting on tags in Tagger, as well as a way of rewarding our package maintainers and other Fedora contributors.
• PackageKit integration – We could provide an API for PackageKit to use Fedora Packages and its optimized search results for returning package data rather than querying yum for this information. One advantage to this approach is that PackageKit could get the icons from Fedora Packages, even for packages not already installed on the system.
• GNOME Shell integration – As mentioned earlier, the idea came up to allow GNOME shell to access the optimized search including tags to display appropraite applications directly in the shell.
• A query language – We could implement a query language for the search to make it even more efficient to find what you are looking for.
• Subpackage display in search results – This is a minor bug, but right now if your search terms match a subpackage, we display both the subpackage, its parent, and all of its sublings. We should only be displaying the subpackage(s) that match the search terms and its parent.
• Newly-added tags don’t display on the package card right away in tagger – another minor bug we can address.
• Improved linkage to bugs mentioned in spec files and patches – we have some links working now, but folks aren’t incredibly consistent with how they refer to bug numbers in their commit messages and comments so we missed a few.
• Diffs between versions for spec files – is this something you’d be interested in seeing?
• Diffs between the spec and its patches – this could show if you’re carrying patches for a package that aren’t even referenced in your spec (I think we saw a few instances of this too.
• Interaction with the Fedora system accessing Fedora Packages – we talked about possibly having an icon or notification on a package’s profile if we detected that you have it installed, or if you have it installed and there’s an update available for your version. (In the released versions table we could even highlight your release.) We could also pre-populate the release dropdown filters across the UI with your current version. For updates, it might be cool to show which ones you have installed and allow you to easily given them karma.
• Default or not? – some kind of indication on a package profile to show whether or not it is installed by default.
• Timestamp the screens – we could display a timestamp on each page of packages… since we’re working from cached data.
• Subpackage versions bug – right now we give subpackages the same version number as the parent even though they might not have the same version number as their parent, in active releases overview, might fall over in some edge cases on the relationships / contents tabs
• Off-site upstream summary link indicator – this is a super-minor designery desire here, but I thought it would be nice to add an ‘offsite’ icon to indicate the upstream webpage links are outside of Fedora infrastructure (see “Patterns for Expressing Expansion Link Weights in Web Applications” and “More Link Treatments”.
• Maintainer mail-to links – Right now we don’t link the maintainer’s name, it’s just plain text. Pingou suggested that we use the maintainer alias email addresses. We also discussed potentially providing, in a panel that pops up when you hover over the maintainer’s name, showing their IRC nick, emailaddress, and buglist. We opted to not do anything yet because we wanted to see what you might ask for here. What do you think?
• Alpha-sort subpackages list – we don’t do this now I don’t think.
• [NEW] Type-ahead in the searchbox – (idea from CodeBlock) this would be especially awesome once you’re already at a package profile page because you won’t have to bounce to the front page, you can go directly to the page you want

Summary & Where the Action is At

So we hopefully have provided Fedora package maintainers (and users? Maybe?) a better tool for managing information about packages this time. We now also have Tagger, which allows those of us (like me! ) who are less technical but still want to help Fedora a way to contribute and learn more about what’s available in Fedora along the way.

My life is now complete, and Tagger made it happen: I discovered xteddy!

I do think it was the right call to keep things as minimal as possible first. I think it left the slate open for a huge number of ideas (as you can see above) directly from you. We still have a lot further to go, though: your help, suggestions, and feedback all this time have of course been critical and we’ll need more. If you’d like to get involved, here’s the rundown:

Fedora Packages

Fedora Tagger

Oh, what about that weird radioactive panda post?

Remember that weird hot-dog-seemingly-with-a-grudge-with-a-panda post? Well, check this out (it will get even cooler soon with Fotios’ parallax animation… heh, heh, heh.)