The Life of RubenV (Ruben Vermeersch) » gcds

Post GCDS

Ruben — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:57:39 +0000

This post is long overdue, but still deserves posting: I went to GCDS earlier this month and I cannot deny the fact that I had a great time. Some remarks:

The whole conference appeared to be nicely organized, kudos to the organizers for that.
Having GUADEC and Akademy at the same location was quite interesting. What struck me the most was how differently both communities experience their conference. I was under the impression that KDE hackers prefer to hack at the conferences, while we GNOME people prefer to talk.
Related to that point: GNOME people tend to spend longer hours at the parties. KDE people are nice chaps, but they go home awfully early. Other GNOME hackers observed this fact as well.
The amount of friendship and open-minded unconstrained communication between everybody in our community is amazing, especially given the fact that most of the people there worked at competing companies. This is something that might be very hard to find in any other corporate environment
Spending time in the presence of all this people is extremely motivating. We should especially invite summer of code students to come to GUADEC.
Massive thanks to all the sponsors organizing the parties, Codethink sponsoring the pre-SMASHED dinner and OpenSuse (and Guy Lunardi in particular) to sponsor the big dinner at the beach on Thursday.
And an enormous thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of my travel and stay.

Am already looking forward to the next edition, be it with or without Akademy.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

A tale about design

Ruben — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:48:26 +0000

Last week at GCDS, we rented a minivan and road-tripped around the island. One Banshee hacker (Bertrand), one F-Spot hacker (me) and six guys from the GNOME art team (Garrett, jimmac, Benjamin, Andreasn, Vinicius and mpt). From a risk management point of view, this was suicide, who whould do our artwork if we drove into a ravine? Fortunately, that did’t happen, we had a great day and I can write this blogpost, a tale about design.

We were already aware of it, but hadn’t fixed it yet: the F-Spot preferences dialog is totally netbook unsuited. And it is extremely ugly. Behold:

The old preferences dialog (Larger version)

During GCDS, I was approached by Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt). He wanted to redesign our preferences dialog and fix it. We had a good chat and ran over the current preferences dialog, what it does and why. Two or three hours of sketching and drawing later, he presented this:

Preferences dialog mockup (Larger version)

It’s a simple paper mockup, describing the current dialog, what’s wrong and how we can improve it. This was then followed by a proposal for a new design. For a hacker, this is gold. We generally aren’t the best user interfaces designers (let’s just admit it), but we do like good design. When given a spec, we can make things happen quickly. This mockup made sense and it was sound: it follows the HIG.

I handed it over to Stephane Delcroix and an hour of hacking later, we had a new preferences dialog:

The new preferences dialog (Larger version)

Much nicer!

The moral of the story
The moral of this story is twofold:

For hackers it’s important to realize that our artwork team isn’t just a bunch of guys with an obsession for pretty icons. They also do our visual styling and help us design great interfaces (one of the things that made GNOME to be a success). If your interface sucks, turn to them.
For designers: we love you and even if you don’t feel like coding, a simpel well thought-out mockup can have a huge effect. If you feel stuff is suboptimal, go to the maintainers and talk to them, usually it’s not a big change, but with a large result. And generally maintainers love UI suggestions, if they make sense. And as a shameless plug: we at F-Spot really love UI designers, we know it isn’t what it should be and if anyone wants to help with these kind of things, do get in touch.

It’s this kind of cooperation that makes the GNOME community such a nice place to be in.

Graduation & GCDS

Ruben — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:45:47 +0000

Officially a computer scientist
As of today, I have graduated and I am now officially a master of computer science, with a specialization in software engineering. Awesome! I graduated magna cum laude (with an average of 81.52%) and scored 18.5/20 on my masters thesis. Needless to say, I’m very pleased with this.

The master thesis: 85 pages of fun

What’s next? After much indecision as to whether I’d like to find a job in the open-source (GNOME) world or do something else, I’ve accepted a PhD offer at the Distrinet Research Group of K.U.Leuven. GNOME hacking will stay a spare-time activity for now, though I might change that decision in a few years. Exciting times ahead!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit
Tomorrow I’ll be flying out to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I’ll be spending 11 days in Gran Canaria. I will be arriving in the late afternoon, so that shouldn’t stop me from dropping by at the Canonical hosted opening party. Really looking forward to another GUADEC, Istanbul 2008 was really great. Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of this trip, without them, this would not have been possible.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GUADEC)

I won’t be giving a talk, but if anyone wants to have a chat about F-Spot (or any other subject), come and find me!