The GNOME community's design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 3, which is tentatively scheduled for release in September, will introduce new user interface paradigms and include an upgraded desktop shell environment.

The participants at the hackfest are aiming to improve the usability of existing applications, enhance the look and feel of the desktop with new theming concepts, and brainstorm ideas for extending the functionality of the new shell. They are actively publishing mockups, design documentation, usability notes, and other materials that provide insight into their vision for the future of GNOME. By reading all of this material, I was able to get an understanding of their goals and plans.

A shiny vision

The highly excitable Seth Nickell—an interaction design consultant who previously worked at Red Hat and participated in the OLPC project—has documented some of the concepts that the hackfest participants assembled over the course of the week. The document, which is written in a style that resembles a perverse mashup of the Dhammapada and Timecube, describes new user interface elements such as the "Task Pooper" that could potentially appear in future versions of GNOME.

A mere summary of the design document really can't do justice to Nickell's unique prose. Before I get into the details, I think it would be appropriate to offer a representative sample so that you can get a sense of the flavor:

Focus needn't come at the expense of restrictions on intermixing tools, as long as the toolbox itself can be kept in-hand: ready to subconsciously draw upon, as a coke can unto your lips. yea verily. like a craftsman in her own shop; chisels come and go, but the cabinet stays in-mind. the flow of the task should never be kicked out of MIND by the act of execution.

The design largely emphasizes task-driven interaction and explores ways that this model can be enabled more effectively on the desktop. In the design document, there is a reference to research conducted at PARC which found that many people use their e-mail inbox as an ad-hoc to-do list. Some of the new GNOME design concepts are a response to that pattern.

The GNOME Task Pooper concept, which is intended to bring first-class task management to the desktop, has a content drop-zone that organizes itself temporally. It will automatically move expired content into an archive so that immediately relevant action items are easily accessible and not obscured by clutter. Beyond the initial 3.0 release, the document says that the Pooper could eventually be augmented so that users can drag entire windows and workspaces into it for later use.

Behold the majestic Task Pooper

In addition to outlining some new desktop components, the design document also defines some specific interaction features. For example, it describes a new take on desktop panels. In many conventional desktop operating systems, there are docks and window management panels that can be configured to hide automatically and reappear when the mouse cursor touches a screen edge. The GNOME designers contend that reconstituting a panel on mouse-over creates a number of usability problems and leads to incidents where the panel appears when it is not wanted.

Their solution is to use mouse "velocity" to determine when the panel is wanted. The panel will pop up when you throw the cursor at the screen edge with a little bit of momentum, but it won't appear when you merely have your cursor positioned on the edge. The design document compares it to the kind of cupboard doors that you have to push to click open. They also have some specific ideas about how to translate this concept to touchpads where it's possible to take advantage of gestures for more expressive interaction.

Nickell has been huffing the Kool-Aid with fierce conviction and seems fairly enthusiastic about the proposed desktop enhancements. In a blog post earlier this week, he claimed that the GNOME team's ideas to improve window management and desktop control "may amount to a bigger improvement in deep interactions with the UI than any desktop OS in the last decade can boast."

"Today, we had a breakthrough; the boldest, baddest synthesis for a desktop we have ever hit upon," he wrote. "For a desktop redesign with a 6 hr genesis it is relatively concrete, its not handwavy, its not buzzword-y, its not taillight chasing. It is targeted at a whole mess of real pains (both little jabs and big aches you barely know are there), and it solves them in elegant,gorgeous, functional ways. I am excited. I am really, really excited. This should scare you. It scares me. But I hope you'll bear with us; and by bear I mean 'help us carry the load'. Help us make this real! Help us refine the bad parts! Help us eliminate the bad sub-designs! Help us shoot flames from our eyes and launch dragons from our missile tubes. Help us break granite with our faces. Descend with us, little lambs, into the labyrinth of chasomagic."

Despite his protest that the new design isn't "handwavy," I had a hard time seeing how all the pieces fit together after reading the initial document. It will hopefully become clearer in the coming months as the documentation evolves. Obviously, not all of it will be implemented in time for release in September.

Impressive mockups

Although Nickell's colorful rants and outside-the-box thinking are especially good article fodder, the hackfest seems to have produced a lot of other good work that is equally worthy of mention. Hylke Bons of Intel and Jakub Steiner of Novell collaborated on some impressive mockups that demonstrate ideas for a next-generation GNOME visual theme.

It adopts some of the best visual elements of Intel's Moblin look and feel and openSUSE's beautiful Sonar theme. I especially like the angled tabs and the soft rounding on the textboxes. The amount of padding feels a bit heavy, but that's typical of GNOME's traditional aesthetic. In general, I think that the mockups are aiming in the right direction. If implemented, it would represent a very tangible improvement to GNOME's look and feel.

Another nice idea that came out of the hackfest is a plan for a new GNOME configuration tool that will include a collection of advanced options and lesser-used settings—in the spirit of TweakUI or similar tools. Steiner and Bons produced the following mockup to illustrate the idea:

Conclusion

Máirín Duffy of Red Hat published a series of clear and detailed notes this week that provide insight into a wide range of design issues that were covered during the event. Her blog is really the best place to start reading if you are interested in getting more details about what transpired during the hackfest.

One of the topics that she wrote about is a plan proposed by Steiner and Bons to adopt Moblin's outline-style icon theme for certain parts of GNOME, such as the on-screen display and the panels. She also documented some presentations about usability and accessibility and wrote up a GNOME vision brainstorm which includes some good ideas about collaboration.

It's still too early to say whether the new desktop design concepts will achieve the success anticipated by Nickell. Keep in mind that the mockups and design document are still at relatively early stages of the design process and haven't begun to enter the implementation stage yet. GNOME has always had a strong commitment to incremental development, so it's likely that the new ideas will get deferred for future versions after the initial 3.0 release.

There is an existing GNOME 3 shell prototype (which we will be looking at closely in a future article) that already represents a big change for the desktop environment. It's important to understand that the GNOME Shell effort is separate and distinct from the new features that were proposed at the hackfest. The new features could potentially be added to the Shell or implemented as separate components.

The success of GNOME, and its popularity among commercial Linux distributors, is partly attributable to the project's predictability. The GNOME community has traditionally not embraced risk and generally works hard to minimize any kind of disruption. OEMs and commercial software vendors find that consistency appealing, but the downside is that it creates the risk of stagnation and "decadence." The jump to GNOME 3 offers an opportunity for a clean break and a new infusion of innovation. The designers are clearly taking advantage of this opportunity with the hope of delivering a more beautiful and usable desktop experience.