Since I’m now using Gnome as my primary desktop environment on Linux, I find myself wishing I had a simple outlining application along the lines of OmniOutliner. However, there doesn’t appear to be such a thing for Gnome (despite some old/abandoned projects).

Unfortunately, my limited skill set does not include the skill necessary to create such an application. So, instead of coding, I’ve started a draft of a specification for an application-to-be: Gnome Outliner. I’ve written this in hopes of generating developer interest to create such an application.

I’ve written up the idea and done a basic mock-up of the interface. Please let me know if you have any interest in the project.

UPDATE: There is now a project for this on SourceForge: Gnome Outliner.

After getting some great feedback (and some really nice compliments) about my recent article, The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software, I was asked if it could be re-published at the O’Reilly Network site, OSDir.com.

I’ve always enjoyed O’Reilly publications, so it’s a cool honour to be part of it: The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software at OSDir.com.

Open Source software is regularly criticized, often fairly, for lacking in ease-of-use and polish. When a developer wants a new feature – he can add it to the software, and if it gets checked-in by the project owners, it will be there for all to use. The obvious fault with this model is the now well known scourge of “creeping featuritis” – when too many features and options begin to overwhelm and overshadow the core functionality of the software.

The Mozilla browser and suite were a high-profile example of the ills of featuritis. While the software did everything you could possibly want it to, people still seemed to prefer other software packages that did less.

In a well run software project (several of which I fancy myself a part of), any additional feature must be proved valuable before it is incorporated. Even if a patch is already written to add a new feature, there are plenty of reasons not to accept it. More code means more potential bugs and more management. Additional user interface features can detract from other more important features.

Learning to Say “No”

One of the most important acts of a software project manager is to say “no”. No, this patch introduces more code than it should. No, this feature will confuse more people than it will help. No, you’re ugly and stupid (sometimes the manager has a bad day).

The open source software model has dealt with the importance of saying “no” quite well in the realm of code and patches. Projects have a limited set of people with the power to commit code to the project. Anyone can submit a patch, but only the anointed few can accept it. These anointed few are usually determined by right of having founded the project, inherited the project from the founder, or through perceived merit. For more on the issue of project ownership in free software, see Eric Raymond’s Homesteading the Noosphere.

When submitted code isn’t up to snuff, it isn’t accepted (ideally). The practice of saying “no” to patches in open source software is understood and accepted. Now, some projects seem to be learning the value of saying no to ideas and features that will negatively affect the interface and experience of using the software.

Living Examples: Firefox

The Firefox icon, rendered by Jon Hicks

In discussion about the usability of open source software, the Firefox web browser is sometimes cited as an exception^[1]. Out from under the girth of the Mozilla project, this small and simple browser emerged to become one of the more popular open source products and projects. The developers of Firefox leveraged the long and proud history of saying “no” to code patches and applied it to the interface and functionality as well.

The resulting browser provides a better browsing experience than it’s ancestor, Mozilla Navigator, despite having far fewer features and functions. Smart default settings and an overall better understanding of the experience of using the application by the developers helped make it better for everyone.

Living Examples: Gnome and the Spatial Nautilus

Spatial Nautilus isn’t really much to look at – you really have to use it to understand it. Screenshot from ArsTechnica.

If you think “Gnome and the Spatial Nautilus” sounds like a line from a novel that Douglas Adams and J.R.R. Tolkien might be collaborating on in the afterlife, please bear with me. Gnome is a group of projects that provide a desktop environment on Linux. Nautilus is the name of the file manager in Gnome, like Explorer in Windows and Finder on the Mac.

The “spatial” browsing metaphor a concept for browsing and managing files and directories of which the details are not important for this essay (to learn more about spatial browsing, see John Siracusa’s seminal article, About the Finder…). Suffice to say, the Gnome project has implemented spatial browsing in Nautilus in their latest release, and a lot of people really don’t like it.

Using the spatial browsing metaphor can take some getting used to, and many people who are used to another metaphor (or no solid metaphor at all) are understandably quite resistant to this new model. A fundamental and controversial shift like this is one I would not have expected an open source project to be able to pull off. While a closed corporation has a hierarchy of power, where one person can make a decision for all, consequences be damned, I was skeptical that such a move could happen in the looser structure of the Gnome project.

I was wrong. The developers of Nautilus debated and then declared their bold intent to “go spatial”. There has been much support, and much resistance. However, regardless of whether they were right (which will likely be proven over time), they deserve credit for making such a strong, clear, and decisive move.

Living Examples: Hunting for Preferences in Gaim

The Gaim messaging client is starting to get simpler with each release with a planned simplification of the preferences.

A third and final example of this pattern of interface elegance in open source software comes from a recent discussion on the development mailing list of the Gaim instant messaging client. Gaim is an open source messaging client that works with a variety of protocols (AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, etc.).

Sean Egan, lead developer on the Gaim project, has posted his intent to dramatically simplify the “Preferences” in the application. He lists many preferences that can simply be replaced by a good default, and others that are just plain irrelevant. Rather than getting bigger and fancier with each release, the project seems to get simpler and more elegant.

Killing the Myth of the “Average User” and the “Power User”

Rather than aspiring to do everything imaginable, we are better off aspiring to do everything we might actually want our software to do in practice. While it may be that I’m attracted to projects that tend towards elegance in interface and design, I suspect that the examples I’ve cited here are not exceptions. Rather, I see them as part of a larger trend in open source software – one where simplicity and elegance in interface design is held in the same respect as elegance in code and engineering has been all along.

A kernel hacker, who we might all consider to be a “power user” may not be a power user when he just wants to burn a CD for his road trip. A database administrator, another typical “power user” may just want to chat with his friends, not perform an orchestra of preferences and settings in a chat application. We are all experts in some area of software and beginners in others (and our experience is constantly changing).

Rather than adding more and more features for the mythical “power user”, or swing to the other end of the spectrum and dumb-down the interface for the mythical “average user”, smart developers are learning that good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience.

1. John Gruber cited Firefox and Camino as exceptional in their usability as open source projects in his critical reply to Eric Raymond’s essay, The Luxury of Ignorance. The reasons for the exceptional nature of Firefox and Camino are further discussed by Matthew Thomas.

For the last few months, I’ve been using Fedora, a Linux distribution, as my primary operating system along with the Gnome desktop environment. Linux as a desktop platform still has lots of weaknesses, but I’m generally pleased and am very much looking forward to the progress planned in the next year.

I’ve written plenty before about the tiny details that can have a significant impact on the user experience on operating systems. Windows XP is rife with little visual glitches and inconsistencies that seem insignificant when considering individually, but together they degrade the overall polish and sense of stability in the system. It’s like seeing cracks, no matter how small, in a bridge you’re walking on.

I’ve noticed a few little user interface niceties worth sharing:

Smart File Renaming

In Windows XP, one click selects a file, then a second click (and a short delay) renders the file name editable. In Mac OS X, any click on the file name renders the file name editable. In my experience, on both platforms, the file renaming functionality is triggered by accident far more often than it is intentionally.

Gnome, and the Nautilus file manager (the equivalent of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder) allows you to rename files only by right-clickling and choosing “Rename…” from the context-menu. While it may seem like the function is “hidden away” behind the context-menu, give that renaming files is a far less frequent tasks then double-clicking on them or moving them (click+drag), this is an appropriate trade-off. Accidentally triggered the file-renaming functionality in both Windows and Mac OS, I’m happy to report that the Gnome technique is much better.

Also, when you do rename a file, the file name, not including the file extension is selected by default. So, if I want to rename a file called Diary.doc to Journal.doc, I right-click the file, select “Rename…”, and type the new name. The ”.doc” file extension isn’t select by default, so it goes unaffected. In the rare case that I do want to rename a file, including the extension, I can easily manually select the extension as well. To do the same task in Windows, you must re-select the first part of the file name, manually excluding the file extension (which takes a fair amount of manual dexterity with a mouse) to avoid removing the file extension (Mac OS gets extra points here for avoiding file extensions where it can).

Smart Screenshots

In Mac OS X, when you take a screenshot, a PDF file is placed on the desktop. PDF is an awkward choice for a file format for a screenshot and if the desktop is obscured by windows, as it often is, then there is little feedback of where your screenshot has gone (though, to their credit, the camera-shutter sound is the best audio feedback of a screenshot on any platform). In Windows, the screenshot is sent to the clipboard, and then must be pasted into an application for use. Again, there is no feedback as to where your screenshot has gone.

View Full Size Image

In Gnome, when you take a screenshot, you are greeted by a window with a preview of your screenshot with options to save it. You can also drag the preview from this window directly into an application (an image editing application, or into an email for an attachment). Nice.

Don’t Tie My Hands

Using Windows Media Player, it is quite difficult to get a screenshot of a playing DVD. If you take a screenshot while a DVD is playing, you’ll see a big empty black box where the movie should be. In order to overcome this issues, Totem, the movie player I’m using on Linux (which is a great, simple, media player – something that doesn’t seem to exist on Windows) there is a tool built in to take screenshots of a playing movie. Under the “Edit” menu, select “Take Screenshot”, and you’ll be presented with a window much like the nice Gnome screenshot window with options to save the screenshot.

A screenshot from a Pearl Jam concert DVD taken by the Totem, the Gnome media player

Who said fonts aren’t good in Linux?

While browsing font files (TrueType, OpenType, etc.) in Nautilus, the file icons are replaced with a small preview of the font. Very handy when you’re browsing for a particular font.

Font Previews in Nautilus: View Full Screenshot

Zooming Files

Nautilus, the Gnome file manager includes a few simple but powerful tools, always visible. On any window, you can easily zoom in or out, showing more or less information about the files in the folder. For example, if you zoom in, it will show you the file size, but if you zoom out, only the file name is shown. Since Nautilus does a great job of showing thumbnails of image files, zooming in and out in a folder full of photos is particularly useful (this also applies to the font previews mentioned above).

Now when I’m browing files, especially image files, on either Windows XP or Mac OS X, I find myself looking for the zoom controls – a good sign that Nautilus does it right.

Take the good with the bad: Looking forward to a GUI that’s more gooey.

The single greatest weakness I see in using Linux as a desktop is difficult to articulate: the “feel” of the graphics just isn’t there yet. This includes the smoothness and speed with which menus open, windows are moved, etc. Don’t get me wrong, Gnome is easily on par with Windows XP as far as graphics and visual on my laptop (a relatively new P4/2Ghz/1GB-RAM). It’s Mac OS X that has taken a leap forward in this area. The PDF and OpenGL based graphics rendering in Mac OS X gives an overall feel of speed, powerful, and stability that makes Windows and Linux feel like they’re made of paper mache in comparison.

As with most problems on Linux, lots of smart people are working on it. I’m looking forward to progress in the next year in the X windowing system that Gnome uses. Also, I understand the 2.6 Linux kernel, which I’ll be upgrading to soon (I’m running 2.4 right now) offers significant improvements in user interface response times.