Speaking as someone who is a big fan of simplicity, this seems like the sweetest, shortest, most correct commentary on the EU constitution that I’ve seen. 250 pages? (Oh, and the NYT had the gall to say that a 250 page document ‘bore a lot of similarities’ to the US Constitution. Mind boggling.)
Threw up some pictures from GUADEC Day 1. Because f-spot is making it so easy to caption stuff and upload it (captioning things in gallery sucks) I find myself telling more stories there and fewer in the blog, which is an interesting (and probably largely undesirable to me) side effect. I will say that like others, I’d expected an industrial wasteland and instead found this very beautiful city.
I usually slavishly attend as many talks as possible, but this year I have drifted- spent a lot of quality time talking with Havoc and Seth about UI design (particularly as opposed to UI testing) and how Seth really needs to write out a ‘beginners guide to designing a new GNOME program.’ There would be a couple of really important wins for us if we did that (and I think I had a couple others yesterday, but now I don’t remember what they were.)
- Experience with doing ground-up design (even inexpertly) would make people more receptive to experience design by experts, as the HIG has made us all more receptive to UI testing and what Seth refers to as ‘interaction design’ (as opposed to experience design.)
- While some people certainly have a preference for top-down, expert-driven design, and there are some good reasons for it, that approach doesn’t scale. And people are going to write the apps, whether or not they have the expert-driven design. Better to give them the tools to try (and perhaps occasionally succeed) themselves, than to have all of them fail for lack of understanding.
Some people I’ve met for the first time (really, always the best part of GUADEC):
- The totally awesome Olav Vitters.
- The fairly wacky Jono Bacon.
- LDTP’s energetic Nagappan.
- James “Lovin'” Bowes.
- Others, I’m sure, but last night was a long night. Miracle I remember as many names as I do ;)