1. Collaboration discussion

Points raised by designers at the 2010 usability hackfest.

• Every year we say "we should communicate better", and we don't
• The thing missing now is tools
• How would a collaborative design tool work?
  • Telepathy integration for design tools, to chat with other designers

  • An open-source equivalent for DropBox

    • notifying you of changes to remote files
    • graphically showing history of files and diffs
    • on a conflict, makes a copy rather than replacing/resolving
    • but then how does developer/designer discussion get stored?
    • this could integrate with Nautilus
      • but what if they're not part of the Gnome project?
• "We need to be able to share ideas with each other without being afraid"
• It shouldn't be technical, you shouldn't need to know Git, it should Just Work
• possible components: Wizbit (wizbit.org), CouchDB, Google Wave
• Inkscape works with local files, so whatever it is should sync local files
• shouldn't require negotiating with your company's IS team to set up a server
• designers and developers can add notes to mockups (jQuery on a Web page?)
• IRC bot: "a new mockup has been posted"
  • could collect IRC discussions of that mockup and post them on the Web page
• need to make the tool really simple, to attract new, non-technical designers
• make Bugzilla show thumbnails for images
• repo view (e.g. cgit) should show actual images rather than hex dumps

Who will implement this?

Desired changes to Inkscape:

• options to make embedded bitmaps safer (relative paths, more obvious embedding)

• "View" > "Grid" and "View" > "Color-Managed View" (what?) should be boolean

• Bugs 399776, 365458

• save an archive containing the SVG, all necessary bitmaps and fonts