[Shotwell] Shotwell, early draft

[Adam Dingle]

Tor,

On 07/20/2010 03:09 AM, Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo wrote:
> Still wonder about the rationale behind making the background color an option…this is the kind of setting that should be curated for the user by people like you, Adam ;-)
>    

It sounds like you think we may have made a mistake by introducing the 
background color slider in Shotwell.  I agree that programs shouldn't 
have too many options, and I generally favor an option only when a 
significant number of users aren't satisfied with a program's default 
behavior.  We added the background color slider because at least one 
user told us they didn't like the default gray background, plus we knew 
that some commercial photo programs (including iPhoto and Aperture) let 
the user choose a shade of gray for the background.  But, still, it's 
not clear how many people use the slider.

So, I'm curious: do people on this mailing list actually use the 
background slider to set a background color other than the default 
gray?  If you do, feel free to send me email directly and I'll summarize 
to the list.  If virtually nobody uses the slider, we could consider 
taking removing the option (perhaps still letting advanced users set the 
background color using a theme text file, as described in 
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/318 ).

>>
>> In my opinion Shotwell's current approach, in which the providers' web pages appear in a Shotwell dialog, has an easier user flow than if Shotwell were to launch a separate window or browser to display those pages.  If you think that your approach would be easier for the user, I'd be curious to see a series of mockups which show what each step of the publishing process looks like in your vision.
>>      
> Yes, the dialog approach is better than a separate window. But I was wondering if it's possible to make the look of the content in the dialog more customized to fit better in the app – so people experience it as a part of the app, not as a dialog from Facebook, if you know what I mean?
>    

It's not clear to me what you mean by "more customized to fit better in 
the app".  Some of the pages in the dialog come directly from publishing 
providers such as Facebook and we have little control over how they are 
rendered.  And we must present these pages in order for users to be able 
to log in - that's simply how these publishing services work.  Given all 
this, we've done our best to construct a dialog that *does* feel like 
part of our application.  If there are specific further changes to the 
dialog you think we should make, we'd be happy to hear about them.

>
>> Shotwell has had a tree view of events since its very earliest releases: this lets the user easily find photos from any given year and month.  I expect that the tag list will also become a tree soon since many users have requested this (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1401).  We're also thinking about adding a geographic tree to the sidebar which lets the user browse photos by the location they were taken (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1473) as well as a folder browser tree (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1594).
>>
>> I can imagine some greatly simplified photo manager which has no trees at all, but that would not be Shotwell.
>>      
> I'm using iPhoto as a reference here, which is a simple photo manager – which is really suitable for the average user. Isn't Shotwell aiming to be the photo manager for these kind of users? I always thought that, since it's supposed to be the default in Ubuntu after F-Spot. Making it too advanced might alienate novice users, to which this is the first photo managing app they'll use on Ubuntu.
>
> On the other hand, novice users might not even use nesting in the events and tags – but they might create nested items by mistake, and then it would be a ux problem, making the app feel more advanced than necessary.
>    

I'm not convinced that a tree view is so hard to use.  It's true that 
iPhoto has no tree in its sidebar, but other non-professional photo 
programs including Picasa and Windows Photo Gallery feature trees 
prominently in their user interfaces and presumably have millions of 
active users.  F-Spot also uses tree views for its hierarchical tags, 
and also for its folder view.  Lots of Shotwell users have asked us for 
hierarchical tags (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1401), and a tree view 
seems like the natural way to present those.  So, like it or not, I 
think that tree views in Shotwell are here to stay.

Given this, is Shotwell an appropriate default photo program for Ubuntu 
users?  I certainly hope so.  Lots of people have written us to say that 
they find Shotwell refreshingly easy to use among Linux photo managers, 
and I'd like to believe them.  :)

cheers
adam