mon journal - par Vincent - Make it fun - Comments

Make it fun - Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 13:14:07 +0000

Nathan: of course, we have to make application work and fix crash. This is a priority. But we should not forget the fun. Just consider your GNOME desktop right now and suppose it never crashes any more. Now, is it better to have fun on top of this or not?

I'm of course not talking about fun things that gets in your way. But fun details you discover. Fun apps. Fun themes. Fun sounds. It's a kind of way to polish the Desktop so that it's more pleasant.

Steve: I'm not sure about Fifth Toe. It had some redundancy in it, apps were not totally integrated in GNOME, etc. Maybe Fifth Toe with more "control" in it would be a good idea, though.

Make it fun - Steve George

Steve George — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:02:03 +0000

I think we started losing the fun bit after 1.4 when the confusion over simple and 'simple enough' started - consequently, there has been a lot of regression in the past between releases, Miguel posted about this a while back. Whenever it is brought up then the 'usability experts' always come out with 'we know better than the users' - Nautilus navigation is such an example, even if it is right it was the WRONG move for the users. Adding in some fun applications, some nice features and adding a bit more _fun_ to the desktop shouldn't be that hard ... but in order to do so we have to release some of the corporate conservatism that is in GNOME now.

The second issue is who the target market is. GNOME has always said that we supply a core and then distributors add stuff around it - consequently, it is their fault that lots of great apps are not in the distribution. When you compare this approach to KDE they provide a feature/function complete system that an end-user could use. The problem with the distributors is they want to differentiate their offering so we land up with different 'versions' of the GNOME desktop - so Abiword is in Ubuntu but is not core to Fedora. I think the very tight definition of what is the platform and what is the desktop was ,hijacked by people who come from the distributors (Havoc/Miguel etc). I don't think it was intentional, but the impact is that our offering is very BORING - people use a complete desktop system and they see the apps as being part of the desktop. People find it difficult to LOVE something that has NO CHARACTER.

The solution is two-fold; to understand that even if we are aiming for the 'corporate desktop' user we can still include FUN:
FUN + COMMUNITY = EVANGELISM

The second is that we should be __supplying a complete desktop to our end-users__ even if the channel to them is through the distributions. So if re-introduce 'fifth toe' or similar and say to the distributions 'a complete desktop is core+desktop+fifth toe'

Make it fun - Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 11:24:29 +0000

Sorry, I agree with S. Sandmann: "fun" (with quotes) is an Easter egg, just more clutter I have to delete. More important, does the panel still jump back to the top of the screen whenever it crashes? Does it still crash? Does it fail to hide itself (again)? Does the splash box still not go away on login?

If you have to argue for it, it's not really fun. Time wasters stretch out boredom, which is not the same thing at all. When somebody comes up with something that actually is fun, nobody will have to argue for including it; rather, nobody will even conceive of not including it.

[ping] Make it fun - Safe as Milk

Safe as Milk — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 17:59:16 +0000

Making passionate users

Following on from what Vincent said, here's a link from "Creating Passionate Users" on featuritis - try to figure out where GNOME is on the curve. And another one on Easter eggs Another post on "Creating Passionate Users" suggests that passion...

Make it fun - Jon

Jon — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 15:11:31 +0000

What you have to remember is OSX is delivered by Apple in one form. Gnome is distributed by ISVs and distributors, bundled with distribution specific applications.

Surely it is up to the distributors to choose to include "fun" apps or not, and following Gnome-specific guidelines on what should be considered fun.

After all, business desktops don't need fun, but home desktops more than likely do.

Make it fun - Stéphane Raimbault

Stéphane Raimbault — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:34:56 +0000

Vincent, I think you are right! Many people look at games included in KDE or Gnome to say: I like or don't like this desktop.

Have you a fun applications list (with good level in live.gnome.org/GnomeCerti... ) ?
- Monkey Bubble
- Wanda
- ... (gnomefiles is certainly a good source)

Graphics effects are also useful to provide fun (cairo, xgl, glitz, ...)

Not too but a little fun, could be a good step in future Gnome.