Category: Fedora

Contributing to free & open source software as a designer

Conferences / Fedora / FLOSS / Interaction Design / Uncategorized / UsabilityLeave a comment

Next Sunday there’s going to be a FLOSS HCI Workshop at CHI 2010 in Atlanta, GA. CHI is the annual conference on human-computer interaction’ [1] for ACM’s SIG CHI (Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction.) Michael Terry from the University of Waterloo and Paula Bach from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have organized this workshop for both folks in the academic HCI community and HCI folks from the open source community. It’s going to be an opportunity for folks from either or both groups to get together and to share knowledge and propose directions for research both to help inform HCI tools and to further the user experience in free/libre and open source software. My submission for the workshop was a 12-page case study [2] from my own experiences of being a designer in the Fedora community, on the Fedora Design Team. I wanted to post this before the workshop to get your feedback on it so I can bring it up during the workshop when I attend it next week! Let me know if there’s anything in there that’s wrong, anything that might have been forgotten, or honestly any other points at all you would like to see …

A rich web interface for mailing lists

Hyperkitty / Interaction Design Work / Mailing List Improvements53 Comments

Luke Macken and I had a little mini hackfest today on improving collaboration in Fedora. This is an idea we came up with this afternoon and I mocked up most of it on the bus ride home tonight. (A 2-hour bus ride home as the post-Boston-flood road conditions and traffic during rush hour were really bad tonight.) Luke already has a working prototype 🙂 What do you think? The Inkscape source is of course available so please feel free to try out your own ideas and play away and bounce them back! These are some random, off-the-cuff points about some of the ideas behind the mockups to help give some context. I’m likely missing a lot of good points here so I apologize in advance for my sloppiness: threads are flattened to one level to make it simpler to follow both the number of participants and number of comments are noted posts have ratings to discourage one-liner “me toos” replies and also to make quality discussions more visible. not sure though which scheme is best, what do you think? showing a single number which is the positives and negatives added together (digg style) showing two numbers, one for the number …

Fedora 13's Artwork – Need Your Help for F13 Beta!

artwork / Fedora68 Comments

So now that Fedora 13 Alpha is out…. have you given it a try? What do you think about the wallpaper? We want to hear your feedback, because there isn’t actually that much time to update the wallpaper for beta, I think a little over a week. We haven’t gotten much feedback about it yet, so we need to hear from you now! You can give your feedback here in the comments or on the Fedora design team mailing list. How can you provide useful feedback? Here’s a little writeup on that, shamelessly stolen from an earlier blog post: How to Provide Helpful Critique Some folks understandably believe art and design are stuffs enshrouded in a mysterious haze of incense smoke without much logic or reason involved. I get it. I’ve been there too, and I think it’s easy to feel that way – discussions about art works sometimes get a bad reputation for being anywhere from fussy, to bizarre, to completely pointless. You may find solace in the fact that there’s actually plenty of logical principles and elements and a vocabulary for them that can be use to discuss such works in a productive manner that doesn’t involve ‘invoking …

Anaconda & Advanced Storage Devices

Anaconda / Fedora / Uncategorized12 Comments

At FUDcon Berlin I started working on mockups to improve Anaconda’s UI with respect to advanced storage devices. E.g., fibre channel, iSCSI, multipath storage devices, etc. etc. etc. – storage devices beyond simple hard drives in your laptop or in your desktop system case. Right now there are a few concerns for working with these devices in Anaconda: It can be a little difficult to identify these devices. Depending on the interconnect and depending on what information the administrators of the storage devices provide you with, different types of information are useful and some are not. For example, the vendor’s name of a RAID BIOS array may not be all that useful since multiple types of hard drives may be part of the array, but whether or not a SAN is EMC or QLogic may actually be a useful distinguishing characteristic. These types of devices, if there are enough of them on the network, can take too long to load into the UI. It can be a little bit scary to be certain of which drives are merely being mounted post-install and which are getting formatted as part of the install. The Anaconda UI redesign mockup work is still in …