[136] in Athena User Interface
Updated AUI project summary
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Jun 7 20:30:51 2000
Message-Id: <200006080030.UAA25506@interstitial-spaces.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 20:30:47 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
So I made some changes to the chart I circulated earlier...it's now
linked from the project notebook and all. See:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/components.html
It's got a new "description" column which should elucidate some of the
jargon I was using, including things like "virtual locker."
Regarding general progress, I agree there's more than enough work to
prevent us from shipping if we try to do it all. I've arranged the
various independent components in descending priority (based on the
Discovery papers and team feedback). The Office Productivity thingy
has been spawned off into its own project; it's no longer listed.
Along those lines, now that I have a better sense of what our top
priorities actually are, I'm going to try to spend my time working on
those.
Tibbetts is working part-time on getting together a build of his
hacked gmc for me to play with (and perhaps a build of Nautilus, as
well, though I tried myself and would have had to hop on IRC to get
help to make any more progress).
Nautilus looks like it won't be ready for hacking on until sometime in
August, maybe. I think we'll need gmc to stand in for early usability
testing, even though it fails to satisfy some major UI requirements
for novice users. Once I get the hacked version, I can say what
functionality we might want to add to it before we go ship anything,
keeping in mind we'll want to spend as little time on it as possible.
Given the hacking that's alredy done, I should expect we're already
80% done with that. Then, when Nautilus stabilizes, we'll throw gmc
out and make the real thing the right way. It looks like Nautilus
will satisfy all of our UI needs for the FM. Actually, it better,
because I don't see any viable alternatives anywhere (at least not
free or open source ones).
Yak and I talked some about how programs should be added and removed
from the Gnome main menus. Basically, users, in addition to
personally created menus, can add pre-defined menus from a given
locker (say, 18.03 or games) controlled by that locker's admin. We're
also hoping to have menus that bring together programs from different
lockers in sensible ways. Like for the top 10 Internet-related tools,
top 10 Course 18-related tools. These "virtual lockers" might be
adminstration by one or several entities. (Say, SIPB and I/S for the
former, and Course 18 for the latter.)
I suppose I can put "figure out speficially what pieces of software
should be on what menus" on my personal todo list - we can mainly just
reorganize existing compliations of useful software, such as
whatrunswhere, the Dash listing, and peek at major lockers, like SIPB,
consult, etc. The actual hacking to make menu control work should
wait until the test environment stabilizes, I think. (There are also
cross-platform issues which have yet to be resolved.)
Console message handling was also listed as a must-see by the
Discovery Team. Tibbetts and I talked a bit about what the heck this
means, anyway. Basically, we just want to make the console prettier,
by using a modern toolkit to code it up. We will probably be playing
with the Gnome-Athena startup sequence quite a bit, and console
futzing might be involved there.
An extra feature we might not get around to would be some sort of
filter that detects common error messages and provides useful advice
if the user wants. Like turning "lost contact with AFS server
18.179.0.43" into something like "Unable to reach AFS server NYX. The
games locker and your homedirectory will be temporarily unavailable.
If this is an AFS server problem, Athena Server Operations will have
been automatically notified and will correct the problem as soon as
possible. If you suspect a network problem, please contact your local
network administrator or rcc..." etc. But we might not even do this,
due to concern for creating more hosage during a parial outage. Other
common error messages might be cleaner to translate. But anyway...
yak asks:
> What do you mean by "triage"?
I meant that the miscellaneous and session-configuration issues listed
under "General GNOME-Athena issues" need to be prioritized and
reorganized. I kind of grouped them in some cohesive fashion, but I
don't want to decide which of them are easy/hard from a Gnome
perspective, and which are needed/frivilous from a UI perspective
until we get a stable Gnome prototype control center.
I've added the initial xterm as a definite, with the note that someone
should configure gnome-terminal properly. I've made gOLC's priority
"medium." (The Discovery Team said, "it's easy to make it required
since it's almost done!" Well, whatever. 8)
Speaking of easy-to-do things, the printing plan is almost ready; I'll
send out a revision in a little bit. tibbetts asked for some small
things to keep busy while waiting for builds and to prevent insanity,
and the lower-priority apps are great for that.
That's all for now; the rest is in the chart.
Maybe I should figure out which HTML editing tool I'm evaluating makes
the easiest-to-read tables. Blah, bad fonts.
Laters,
Beland
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