Bikeshedding is very common when building things in the open. You get used to it, and you learn which comments are contructive and which ones to ignore pretty quickly.

One thing I still don’t understand though, is this resistance to making things better: denying there is a problem, and trying to think of reasons why you should not improve things. This isn’t because “your design sucks” or “you should have done it this way”, those kind of comments can actually be useful to an extent. The kind of comments I’m talking about are the ones oblivous to the points made and those that just resist change for no good reason.

I bumped into it again on this article at OMGUbuntu! (the writer has good points). Sure this is OMGUbuntu! which can be considered the new Slashdot (comments) from time to time, but because this one was about the font install dialog in GNOME that was redesigned by me and Thomas Wood about two years ago, it reminded me of the same comments we got at the time.

I did a bit of quote mining. Now some of these could be taken with a tongue in cheek kind of way, but it wasn’t very clear. You can read the comments yourself too.

Um… Just drag the folder into Fontmatrix, confirm you want to install those 20 fonts, tick families to activate

I don’t know if you hunted those chocolate eggs, in my ~ the .fonts folder isn’t really far away. Just had to copy fonts there and update the cache.

how is putting fonts in folder called .fonts not intuitive? And setting up a preconfigured copy operation is very easy. You can even add this folder to your favourties on the left and just drag the files onto it…

On ubuntu just double click… Only power users have to install a lot of fonts at same time, and they’re smart enough to locate the .fonts folder!

A simple custom action in Thunar would solve this.

sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

I always install fonts manually (both on Windows and Ubuntu) just because I like it.

kde has a font installer does what you need

You can install fonts via synaptic. There is a package there that has 500mb of fonts.

This article is really a non-issue unless you install twenty fonts at a time, in which case, opening a file manager is really nothing hard and much better than cluttering up the right-click menu.

I found the same kind of backlash (altough to a lesser extend) in my post about the first redesign.

there is (was) an easier way to install fonts in gnome just write “fonts://” in the address bar of nautilus and drag and drop the font you want to install

I’m confused. Why is putting something in /.fonts so hard? When I download a font, the archive manager asks me where I want to stick it. So I say, “Archive Manager, my good man, put it in the .fonts directory,” and it is done. And the next time I fire up whatever program, lo, there is the font.

Why is this, and what can we do about it?

Putting out a RC release to day to find out if there are any big issues before the first stable 0.2 release. The Linux version has been getting some love lately, and it’s now as pretty as its Mac brother.

Make sure to read the updated documentation for use on Github, Gitorious, or your own server.

The NEWS file: 0.2-rc1 for Linux and Mac (Sun Mar 20, 2011)

Hylke: A lot of fixes and optimisations across the backend. Less memory
usage, less crashes. Instant notifications of new changes instead of polling.
Refreshed event log HTML theme. Keeping logs in memory for faster reopening and
loads more goodness.

A more detailed list of changes, and roadmap, can be found on the wiki.

Important: On Mac, make sure to have a symbolic link to git in /usr/bin/git.

Get it here.

With all the rants flying about involving Canonical, Red Hat, GNOME, cabals, design etc. I’ve seen a lot of misconceptions in blog posts and comments about how design is being done in the GNOME project that really need clearing up. Specially the claim that Red Hat is the only one working in this area and working in a cabal with decisions being set in stone.

Here’s a list of some contributors who contributed significantly to GNOME design in the recent years (or even longer) who are not coders and do not work for Red Hat.

• Allan Day (volunteer)
• Lapo Calamandrei (volunteer)
• Garrett LeSage (Novell)
• Andreas Nilsson (Mozilla)
• Kalle Persson (volunteer)
• Andy Fitzsimon (Novell)
• Vinicius Depizzol (volunteer)
• Jakub Steiner (sure, Red Hat, but he did the majority of his work not working for them)
• Calum Benson (Sun/Oracle)
• Matthew Paul Thomas (Canonical)
• Nick Richards (Intel)
• Hylke Bons (me, Intel)
• I’m probably forgetting a few… apologies, but the point has been made.

We hang out in #gnome-design on irc.gnome.org, along with the Red Hat designers and great GNOME hackers. There is no cabal. All design decisions happen in the open. We do not feel like competing with each other, but we want to collaborate and have fun on creating the future instead. Join us!