[Shotwell] Shotwell, early draft

[Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo]

On Jul 20, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Adam Dingle wrote:

> 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 ).


It should take the opinion of a much larger amount of users than one, to introduce a option for everyone, is my opinion. Images gets better contrast with a dark background. But it's hard to say no..and sometimes it's wrong to say no.

> 
>>> 
>>> 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.

Yes, the dialogbox in todays Shotwell works good – I'll take a second look to see if it's anything that can be done to make it go from good to great, but I haven't seen a better solution anywhere else, so maybe it's a hard problem to solve.

> 
>> 
>>> 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.

The crux of user experience design comes from Apple, both Google and Microsoft is known for making advanced solution that alienates novice users, the latter more so than the former though. Even if Shotwell users are voicing a opinion for three view, are these people novice users given a linux distro in their hands recently? I actually use Terminal for a Twitter client (Mitter), and I've just recently started trying out linux. So I would question how novice these users are, that's all.

> 
> 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.  :)

It's a great program, and from what I've experienced a much better alternative for novice linux users than given before.

Cheers, Tor



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Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo / Designer
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