Recently, I read two excellent comments on the Ubuntu community and vision, by Michael Banck and Stephan Hermann. This is my quick story about that.
I started using Linux in August of 2003, after I finished Katimavik. I installed Red Hat 8.0 and later put Ximian Desktop on it. While I enjoyed using it, it was only when I installed Ubuntu in October of 2004 that I truly starting feeling part of the Linux community.
Shortly after that, I went to Mataro and the first Ubutu developer conference on my own money. That was sort of crazy, but there was a comment I heard there that really struck me. "You can't tell the difference between the Canonical people and the community". Now that is the kind of people I want to work with.
Anyway, the point of that long beginning was to discuss my latest crazy idea:
Gnome 3 today
The crux of my idea is that all the pieces are in place for one specific section of Gnome 3, and that is the image editing.
What I would like to see is a unified interface for image viewing, managing and editing.
How would this look? Here is how I would imagine it.
- User opens image. Image is opened in a window somewhat like Eye of Gnome. Across the top are buttons for rotating the image, jumping to the next/previous image in the directoy and also 3 buttons for the "mode". They are labelled: View, Edit and Manage.
- User clicks Edit, and see the gimp interface launch
- User clicks Manage and sees an f-spot/gthumb window sidebar.
What is key is that the main image window doesn't change, you are just opening and closing extra windows around it.
The best part about this is that nothing much has to change. Only the 3 specific applications. We can roll this out slowly. Which brings me to my next part...
Now for the total crack
There is no reason why this could not be extended to every kind of document on the desktop. Open in a viewer, and the launch and edit interface.
Later, we can change the menus. There is an excellent mockup on the Gnome desktop-devel list