Notices by Tobias Bernard (tbernard@mastodon.social)

New GNOME realease cooking 🍲

🌈 TONIGHT! 🌈

Let's build native apps that work offline but can sync when you have a network connection! The GNOME Berlin crew is teaming up with @p2panda for a workshop to explore the technology together and work on prototypes.

To avoid having to download and install SDKs at the workshop set up your computer in advance: https://hedgedoc.gnome.org/gnome-p2panda-workshop

📍️ Where? Offline, Lichtenraderstr. 49 (Berlin)

🕕️ When? Monday Nov 20th, 18:00

#gnome2panda #localfirst #p2panda #gnome #berlin

The last few user-facing changes for 45 have landed in GNOME OS Nightly 🎉

Try it here: https://os.gnome.org

This includes the Activities indicator, and the the split view port for Files and Settings.

Thanks to @alice, @brainblasted, @felipeborges et al for making the latter happen at the last minute (and the release team for granting the freeze break) :)

@aral I opened the apps, why would I be confused about what app I'm in?

If this was a fundamental landmark people would be using it as such, which is not what we've found in practice...

@aral What we've found across a number of research exercises over the years is that:

- Basically nobody uses the app menu, either as a menu or as a focus indicator
- New people are often confused by the app menu, thinking that it's a taskbar/app switcher
- The app menu makes it harder for people to find Activities, because it's right next to it and visually more prominent

Try it for a few days, most people very quickly forget the app menu ever existed :)

The activities indicator has landed 🚀

Thanks to @verdre for the prototype extension, Georges for implementing it in a clean way, and @fmuellner for timely reviews!

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2902

liberal climate discourse dot jpeg

@mntmn Thanks! I agree, I think we struck a nice balance between flexible/easy to draw and uniqueness. 5 years later I'm still very happy with how the style turned out.

The new icons are otherwise a big improvement in terms of style and execution, but this still makes them stick out, unfortunately :(

If you'd like to know more about how to make great app icons, the HIG has you covered: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/app-icons.html

@bugaevc Setting aside that changing icons behind developer's backs is generally a bad idea, how?

Even if you had a hardcoded list or some alpha channel heuristic that did it specifically only for these icons, you'd still not get a good result because everything would be off the pixel grid.

This kind of thing can only be fixed upstream, realistically.

@bugaevc Yeah, just because something's an SVG doesn't mean it'll be sharp if you render it at any random resolution. For example, GNOME icons are hinted for 64 and multiples thereof, so they're sharp at 64, 128, 256, etc. and look okayish most of the time at 32 and 96.

But if you render them some random resolution you'll get half-pixels instead of sharp lines, which looks blurry.

In case you were wondering why the LibreOffice icons look too big on the app grid or dash, this is why: They're the full height of the canvas, instead of using the smaller portrait base shape.

The reason for those base shapes is that we need to balance circular, rectangular and other shapes optically in size (e.g. a circle with the same width as a square looks smaller).

It also allows for more creative shapes, e.g. having an overlaid object (e.g. a pencil) stick out of the rectangle.

I guess the context in which I'm wondering about this is that some problems are being solved over and over again, rewritten in the language of the moment, and so on. Like, GUI toolkits are also insanely hard, yet there are like 5 WIP ones in Rust.

Browser engines are maybe similar in that there are basically no from-scratch implementations, but there we have embeddable libraries you can build an app around. The same doesn't seem to be true for office apps.

Shower thought: Why is nobody working on nice, modern OpenDocument editor apps?

Is it because there are no good backend libraries? If so, why is nobody working on those? Is the spec just bad? Too hard to find funding? Too boring a subject?

Do I know anyone with experience working on documents/office stuff, or has insights on the topic?

Some really fire stuff landing in Fractal lately, kudos @jsparber and Kevin Commaille for pushing things forward #releasereleaserelease

I think one of the biggest structural problems with versatile protocols like Matrix is that it's all one big spec, and the assumption (and example set by flagship client) is that one client should implement all of it.

This means it's impossible to build focused experiences for parts of the overall feature set (e.g. a calls-only app).

Alright, so sounds like there's enough interest to give it a try!

Join us on Matrix ✨

https://matrix.to/#/#appicondesign:gnome.org

Some friends and I were discussing why we do free software even though it often means doing tons of work for little or no money.

I think for me some major factors are the personal agency you have over the work (independent from employers/investors) and the potential for longevity that comes with having your work be part of the commons (projects can't be acquired and killed).

That kind of unalienated relationship to your creative output is very rare outside of maybe fine arts or entertainment.

I'm updating our app icon template, so I've collected some of the different types of paper objects that we've drawn in the GNOME icon style over the years.

It's pretty cool how many different things you can do within the relatively tight constraints of the style and perspective.