The event was together with Latinoware, the (biggest?) Latin American free software conference. Latinoware itself went a bit strange this year. Maybe there was something wrong with organisation, or it was just the rain. The rain was so strong in the last day that almost only half of the participants went to the conference.

For the Fórum GNOME, we got a booth during all the three days and a room for talks during the entire Friday. There were always questions about GNOME 3 by users in the booth, and we spent a great time talking about that and other things with people from all Latin America.

Most of the talks had a focus in the end-user — these were most of the participants in Latinoware. Licio started with his talk explaining how to join GNOME and the GNOME Love Project. Then we got Rodrigo Flores, talking about how to contribute with translation. Alessandro Binhara did a talk about something between Mono, Mono Brasil and Star Wars , which was followed by the GNOME Women talk by Izabel and Luciana. Lastly, I did a talk about user experience in GNOME and Tiago filled the room with his talk about theming and customization.

It was awesome to see many enthusiastic friends from GNOME, Ubuntu-BR, Fedora and KDE. Also, during the conference Everaldo and I discussed a lot about how to clean the user interface of some GNOME applications. We didn’t publish it anywhere yet. But we stopped to think how to do it properly. Like what happened with Hylke’s idea for the font dialog (a designer suggested something and was implemented very quickly by a developer), we agreed it would be nice to have a ArtRequests-like page in the wiki, but for designers asking changes to be made by the developers. We still need to organize a lot of our thoughts however .

I need to say a big thank you to the GNOME Foundation and to all the people who helped the forum happen. Thank you!

This post could be called “Ideas for GNOME Activity Journal during Zeitgeist Hackfest” too.

Every time I see a list of recent documents in some application, I never see what I am looking for. Checking the recent files on the Places menu of gnome-panel gives me nothing more than some links to pictures or text files I opened some time ago which are far from relevant for me right now. The same happens for similar lists in Gedit menu or other applications.

This very approach is initially being used as default for the new GNOME Activity Journal, which is the application who shows data from the Zeitgeist library. In general terms, the Activity Journal is a huge list of everything you did in your computer, ordered by time.

While having all this information is very useful, displaying it is nothing but tricky. Just listing tons of files sequentially won’t help anyone for finding the file you opened yesterday because the relevance “dimension” is missing.

If I just open some files and close them very quickly, than they shouldn’t be more relevant than the document I worked on for three hours. The photos I saw from my last travel shouldn’t occupy all the list of recent files, as I just spent some seconds in each of them.

Group similar activities can be interesting too. Facebook does that for news feeds and it works quite well. Seeing all the photos from my last travel is only one activity for me. Also, people open and close documents all the time. Make important documents easily accessible is more important than list the last closed one.

Besides the talks and discussions (and the tripping around the island!), most of the time the GNOME Art team spent was in the hacking rooms, working on icon drawings, user interfaces mockups, new ideas for streamlining the desktop and coding the new website layout.

As a work in progress, some changes in the website design appeared while I was putting the new content in the layout (and this still needs to be finished!). The original one Lucas Rocha announced is becoming this (feedback is welcome!):

The plan is to release the beta website together with GNOME 2.28. For this, a lot of work needs to be done, including all the teams — content, design and CMS. We got a bit late in the schedule, but we can still get everything ready in time.

If you want to make history and help the GNOME website development, subscribe the marketing list (for the content and design areas) and the web mailing list for the plone implementation and introduce yourself .

I’ll leave Vitória in about 4 hours (at 3:00 PM) and get to Las Palmas tomorrow morning.

In the Saturday I’ll give a lightning talk called “A new Perspective for GNOME Interface” around 5:00 PM.

See you there!

Since I got some time ago my own domain, I decided to start a new blog from scratch. This (luckily) means that I’ll try to blog more often.

YAY!