Welcome to the first-ever GUADEC usability hackfest!

The hackfest will take place from lunch till we get kicked out of the building on Monday, May 30th. We will provide a list of tasks for people to hack on and some help getting started. We will also be continuosly projecting Anna Dirks's usability study videos at one end of the room, to provide inspiration for people looking for something to work on.

Please feel free to add your own ideas below!

Sources of ideas:

Some possible tasks to hack on:

  • Redesign and reimplement the sound properties capplet; see the usability videos for extensive evidence that this sucks.
    • - Jakub Steiner, Federico Mena and Nat Friedman are working on this

  • Rethink the right click -> Create Document menu in Nautilus, which is useless to most people because no templates exist in any distribution, as they can only be installed on a per-user, not a per-system, basis. See again the usability videos.

  • The mouse pointer does not hide itself when it is stationary and I start using the keyboard. As a result, it frequently gets in the way of what I am typing or reading. (from mpt)
    • - David Reveman is taking a look at this one.

  • Replace Floppy Formatter with an item in the Nautilus File menu bug 302038 (mpt)

  • Add "Make Compressed File" to Nautilus's file menu bug 302035 (mpt)

    • - Jürg Billeter is working on this

  • Keyboard equivalents in menus should be left-aligned by non-modifier bug 301827 (mpt)

  • Ubuntu supports the annoying and near-useless Insert and Caps Lock keys, with no obvious way to deactivate them. (Windows and Mac OS also make the mistake of supporting Caps Lock. I mention it here because Ubuntu — unlike Windows or Mac OS — offers no fewer than five options for “CapsLock [sic] key behavior”, but none of them are “Off”.) (mpt)

  • When a program needs administrator privileges to work properly, Ubuntu presents an alert asking for my administrator password. The title of this alert is “Changing user…”, which is incorrectly capitalized and incorrectly punctuated, but most of all, incorrectly worded. I’m not “changing” a “user”, I’m just altering some settings or running a program. (mpt)
  • All the text in the login interface — including the login field itself — is too small, and most of it is too low-contrast, to read comfortably. (mpt)
  • The login screen uses the term “reboot”. (My shoes are fine as they are, thanks.) (mpt)
    • - Nicholas Skehin is looking at this one.
  • The dialog for choosing what language to use lists languages in a control that does not look clickable. Among other options, the list includes “Last” without telling me which language that was, “System Default” without telling me which language that is, and “POSIX/C English” which is an oxymoron. (mpt)
  • Items in Nautilus can’t be renamed by clicking on their names and typing. (mpt)
    • - Daniel Drake and Chris Wilson are checking this one out as you read this (unless you are reading this some time after 6pm on Monday May 30th in Central European Standard Time)
  • My camera functions as a standard USB storage device. When I plug it in, Nautilus places its icon exactly on top of an existing icon on my desktop. (mpt)
  • By default, Evolution does not store a local copy of the folders and messages on my Imap account; it downloads them again every time it starts up. (mpt)
  • When I am not connected to the Internet, Evolution’s attempt to download the messages all over again produces the error “Host lookup failed: imap.myrealbox.com: Temporary failure in name resolution”. Since the lack of an Internet connection is by far the most common cause of failed “host lookup” (what?), it would make more sense for Evolution just to go into offline mode in such cases. (mpt)
  • The Evolution vFolder creation dialog could use a redesign.
  • Same with the Evolution filters dialog
  • Nautilus needs a sidebar that displays the shortcuts available in the Gtk file selector.
    • - It would be nice to have the bookmarks that are available in the file selector available in the Places menus, and to create some defaults such a Documents, Pictures, Music etc...

      - You should really see the RecentFilesAndBookmarks page before doing anything. Also, directly accessing the gtk-bookmark file should be avoided, since the Gtk people could yell at you in a very rough manner (see what happened when the panel did this). - The gtk people have no right to yell at you for accessing the file directly unless they provide an alternative way to access this data. Yell back at them.

  • Eclipse (gtk/whatever version) has the menuitem for installing plugins in it's help menu (wieerd location)
  • I dislike using typical video conferencing applications simply because they force me to stay 'connected' to one person at the time. It would be more 'usable' if an application, like gnomemeeting, would have a roster like gaim: when I doubleclick somebody, I see his videostream. I also have a list of people (not an addressbook) that are online from which I launch sessions (it's the main window, not an optional way of connecting to people). I ca easily close that window, easily restart it (make a new connection to the webcam of the person). Instant videoconferncing.

  • Clean up Save Confirmation Dialogs: UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/SaveDialog bug #303803

  • bug 165343 - Instead of recognizing Super as a modifier, gnome-keybinding-properties considers them to be isolated keys, recognizing the left and right Super keys as Super_L and Super_R respectively. You cannot bind Windows+key to an action.

GUADEC/2005/Hackfest (last edited 2013-08-09 00:40:21 by WilliamJonMcCann)