[500] in Athena User Interface
Re: Eazel coming to give Nautilus demos
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Dec 13 17:41:11 2000
Message-Id: <200012132241.RAA142125@m4-035-16.mit.edu>
To: Rebecca Schulman <rebecka@eazel.com>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, gcorrin@eazel.com, sbjones@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 17:41:03 -0500
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Out of curiosity, what is Eazel's target audience for the demos? From
what I'm hearing, we're not even thinking about releasing Nautilus to
the Athena public until summer 2001 at the very earliest. On the
other hand, last summer we were pondering giving sneak previews over
IAP to build interest in a beta test, but that might not happen due to
slipping release dates on our end. (::sigh::)
A key question I have for the AUI Red Tape Crash Team is: what is the
status of our official go-ahead from senior I/S administration? It
would be poor form to be demoing a project which isn't officially on
the "gonna do it for real" track. On the other hand, overwhelmingly
positive user response might hurry that process along. We've gotten
early results from usability that Gnome-Athena (very much including
the file manager) is clearly better than Athena Classic, though we
haven't formally tested truly novice users yet. Is that urgent?
Personally, I'd love to chat with Nautilus developers. I'm sure we'd
have lots to talk about with regard to what features we find useful to
users, and to get tips and tricks about the software's capabilities.
Will usability people be trucking it out to Boston as well? I've been
lurking on the gnome-gui list, and the Usability Team here has been
heavily involved with AUI recently. We have a lot of ideas about
Gnome UI in general, but we're somewhat lacking in information about
who's doing what, other than that Arlo is cooking up usability
guidelines in his not-so-copious free time, and the people at Sun have
announce an accessibility initiative. MIT already has an
accessibility facility, and a concentrated user base we get personal
feedback from. We'd like to get in on the action and help sort things
out a little, I think, but so far are a little out of the loop.
I have been in touch with Eli, and I will be sending him and Arlo the
results of our usability tests, which are running this and next month,
and which currently feature Nautilus PR2. (It's currently the end of
the semester here, so I've been quite hosed, as you can imagine.)
I don't know how far we've gotten looking at actual low-level
integration (not very, I imagine, considering things are still a
little unstable) but I have been keeping Eazel informed of our
difficulties by flagging problems (mostly either AFS-related or
non-MIT-specific) in Bugzilla.
But anyway...I think scheduling time for our respective people to chat
and play with the software would be cool. Actually, I'll be in the
Bay Area Dec. 2-Jan. 15. (How freaky it would be to actually pop in
to the Eazel offices while I'm there? 8) Back in Boston, I'll be
generally less busy after the 27th. I don't know what other people's
schedules are, though.
If you have a general MIT-public sort of demo in mind, I think we
should answer (mostly for our own benefit) the question of what I/S's
official role should be there, and how we would want to spin the idea
of Nautilus on Athena to the community. (I.e., it's going to appear
over the summer, it's only being pondered, or just ignore that issue
entirely.)
Coolness,
Beland
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 16:19:10 -0800
From: Rebecca Schulman <rebecka@eazel.com>
To: aui@mit.edu
Subject: Eazel coming to give Nautilus demos
I'm writing because Eazel (the company supporting Nautilus development)
is interested in coming to speak at MIT (among other places) about
Nautilus, and to give demos. Would the AUI group be interested in
helping Eazel to set up a place and a time it? We'd like to come around
the end of January, beginning of February, when a bunch of nautilus
developers will be on the East coast to attend LinuxWorld in New York.
Also, it'd be cool to talk about how work in adopting Nautilus for
Athena is progressing, and if we can help make the process easier. Would
any of the AUI developers be interested in getting together with some
nautilus developers while they are in Boston?
If there's interest in these things, Greg Corrin at Eazel is interested
in helping to organize people coming to MIT. He can be reached at
gcorrin@eazel.com.
Rebecca Schulman
------- End of Forwarded Message
