[753] in Athena User Interface
AUI March 2001 Delivery Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Sat Apr 7 01:40:59 2001
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 01:38:11 -0400
Message-Id: <200104070538.BAA01851@pothole.mit.edu>
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@MIT.EDU
CC: aui@MIT.EDU
Project Name: Athena User Interface Project
Project Leader: Andrew Boardman
Report Date: 6 April 2001
Project URL: http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/
Accomplishments Past Period:
- Finalized appearance and aesthetic design for Athena 9.0. (One more
revision of the icons will be done to correct very minor problems, but
the basic look and feel is final, and most importantly, documentable.)
- Updated the Athena 9.0 source base to the GNOME 1.4 (ironically tagged
"Tranqulity") release.
- AUI/GNOME will be shortly be available for general testing on *all*
Athena platforms with the Athena 9.0 alpha release in early April.
Goals for Next Period:
- Work on Nautilus for inclusion as at least an optional element of 9.0.
- Work with Training and Publications for documenting Athena 9.0.
- Work like mad on the Athena 9.0 release in general. (Not, strictly
speaking, completely part of AUI, but the line is blurry, and for the
most part immaterial.)
- Discuss recommendations, direction, and rationale for user interface
changes in future Athena releases. (Timeframe uncertain, but as
we're winding up our design work, it's something to keep in mind to
document for future generations.)
Key Learnings:
- Because of the nature of our work, "full-time" commitment to a project
does *not* imply the availability of 100% of one's time to work on it.
Important and urgent work can (will?) always materialize when least desired.
Issues:
- Integrating the new GNOME release with new operating system releases
involves a great deal of hairy detail work and unexpected release engineering
problems. While none of this is earth-shattering, it eats up a lot of time.
- While Nautilus 1.0 has been released and is running under Athena Linux,
there's currently a lot of negative feeling about including it as a
default part of the user environment for Athena 9.0. It's still slow,
it needs a fair amount of customization work to be compatible with our
environment, and the code is if anything even more non-portable than
previous releases.
Team Dynamics:
- OK. Bob Basch now has some time available for AUI, to be spent on
finishing up the one-time integration issues and other such loose ends
(especially multi-platform Nautilus), and assesing resource requirements
for optional AUI components.
