Jan 15, 2010

Is GNOME Going To Duplicate The Efforts From Canonical?

Gnome Shell recently introduced a new notification system. Sadly it seems like GNOME Shell is going to duplicate a lot of the efforts from Canonical. Besides the notification system the application indicators also have similarities.

It looks like the Notify OSD of GNOME Shell is named the Message Tray. You can see a short screencast demo here: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/mockups/20090630-demo

I was truly hoping that Gnome would continue the fantastic work Canonical is doing rather than starting over. The question still remains, what experience will Ubuntu 10.10 ship?

Source:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf

9 comments:

  1. Hey, this is important news whichever way it goes. I didn't know Gnome Shell people were planning this.

    We have two different processes to consider:
    The Gnome Shell "project" is clearly revolutionary (I speak of the method): They want to design a whole new user interaction, and they look at the whole picture.

    Ubuntu's usability and desktop work is also done with the whole picture in mind, of course, but their method is more evolutionary: Conserving resources by changing what needs to be changed, keeping stuff that works for later.

    I think neither side can be credited for being particularily connected to the other stateholders in the Gnome free desktop. The Gnome Shell people are very closed as group: They produced the vision, the rationale, the design documents and the implementation. Very little actual exchange with other big and small application developers and communities has been seen.

    Also Ubuntu has had the same strategy: "Look how cool our notifications are, this *must* be the future. Shuttleworth himself desgined it/ordered it".

    ReplyDelete
  2. i think it would be better to have something similar to Chrome OS.

    and please, change the commenting system to disqus http://disqus.com/ i hate to comment here

    ReplyDelete
  3. ubuntu should be sure not to ship 10.10 with gnome-shell, it sucks. And there is no reason to say why, since we all know why.

    We need a release that improves on the current experience.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @ROlandixor i don't think that they will do, because it won't be that stable to use, and won't be tested enough

    ReplyDelete
  5. @ulrik

    "The Gnome Shell "project" is clearly revolutionary (I speak of the method): They want to design a whole new user interaction, and they look at the whole picture."

    You've got to be kidding. It's available in KDE since YEARS! Original KDE Krunner (gnome shell is its equivalent) is also much more powerful.

    Btw. is Gnome still Free Software project?

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Pawel: Look up what Gnome Shell is. Krunner is not its equivalent at all.

    ReplyDelete
  7. All I want to know is whether ubuntu developed this to keep it in house, or if they submitted it to Gnome. If they submitted / it is a part of gnome, then re-creating seems unlikely, re-write for better integration I could believe though.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Strange way to look at it. Canonical didn't push their work upstream. How is that a fault of GNOME?

    ReplyDelete
  9. @Rahul

    It's both of their fault, this type of idiocy is only slowing foss down.

    ReplyDelete