GNOME.org

Wow Mo, that mockup looks great. I personally would love to use a GNOME sidepanel widget on my websites. So, not only are the mockups a vast improvement to the current site, they also provide a way to market GNOME and direct people to the site. GNOME Web Team go, go, go…

Orca and Usability in Accessibility

Orca is a great app but part of me wishes we were a little more demanding in letting it into the release. No doubt it is much better than what we had previously but the acceptance process should in general push for higher standards. This time around we had bigger fish to fry so Orca was accepted with little debate most likely because none of us on the release team are really experts in the area of accessibility. Last night I spent my time hacking up a patch that would integrate Orca into the desktop a bit more. It is a hack and needs to be done better upstream but basically I now have the at pref dialog starting and stopping Orca when accessibility is turned on and off. I even added a pref button which brings up the Orca configuration dialog. One still has to deal with Orca’s strange behavior of killing the current Orca every time a new Orca is started (even if it is only to bring up the config dialog). Tell me, does Orca actually work without X? Why not use X selections or D-Bus to handle making Orca a singleton? In any case we should be thinking about usability in accessibility in the same way we look at usability everywhere else. What is needed is a framework where by it is easy to start, stop and get the advanced config dialog of an at service. It should also be easy for at services to respect pref dialog options on the fly. The patches can be picked up from the Orca and control-center source rpms in Fedora.

Leaving the Red Hat Desktop Team

This is at the bottom because it is a bit of non-news. I’m not leaving Red Hat, just moving to a new project. It has been over two years since Havoc hired me onto the Desktop Team. Since then Red Hat has grown in leaps and bounds. New project were created, people were moved around and things changed generally for the better. Yesterday was my last day on the Desktop Team. David Zeuthen and I swap roles today. He is going back to Desktop to concentrate more on HAL and I am going to OLPC to do who knows what.

What does this mean for my involvement with GNOME? Nothing much really. OLPC is still a desktop though very targeted and different from what most people think is a desktop. What is GNOME anyway? Bryan Clark often asks me this question whenever I talk to him. Is GNOME the panel? The apps? According to Luis GNOME is People and the ideals those people represent. We have a certain direction we all believe in. “Simply Powerful” is the abbreviated way of stating this direction. So, me moving to OLPC means I will still be working on GNOME for a long time to come.

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