Obligatory screenshot with everything git:

P.s.: no, that MGS2 trailer is not really an ASX file, but rather Windows Media with an incorrect file extension. It’s just among the little torture tests I throw at PiTiVi and GStreamer sometimes to make sure they’re bulletproof.

In other news:

• There is an insane amount of activity in #pitivi these days. It’s a thrilling time to be involved in the project!
• Thibault Saunier’s “implement effects and make them rock” branch is gradually improving. I’m quite excited about this (even though I rarely use effects myself).
• Some rather important bugs are being addressed, including bugs with still images (png, jpeg, etc.) and those pesky “not linked” gnonlin errors.
• I might try to make a small demo of Thibault’s effects branch at the Ubuntu Global Jam in Montreal this saturday, if there’s an interest for it.

This should make it more reliable than my self-hosted server on a residential DSL connection, and the URL will be less ugly too.

Why do flatbed scanners seem to have so little dynamic range for sketches? I draw for fun, usually with a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. I do not put a lot of pressure onto the pen because it allows for more details/subtle shading. When I scan the images, the “light” details are always blown out and no amount of fiddling xsane’s settings (gamma, brightness, contrast) seems to reveal them. [...]

The best I could do with a scanner was to ensure I scanned in 24-bit color before converting to grayscale (instead of scanning in grayscale directly). The resulting image was slightly better, but not that much: a lot of detail was still missing. I guess generic flatbed scanners are made to scan text and photographs, not fine lineart. A powerful cold-cathode light at 1 mm of the sensor is not exactly subtle.

Your average photo camera doesn’t have this problem, because it has a better dynamic range and you can control the lighting. However, sketches require even lighting. Achieving this is hard. You can’t set-up your gear quickly and effortlessly.

Enter the ring light.

I used the same method as this tutorial, albeit slightly modified:

• I made holes on the sides of the “plastic lampholders” so that the wires could come through the sides, instead of having the wires come through the plywood. Safer, more robust, and easier to rearrange if I change my mind.
• Since I didn’t want to make a custom tripod mount, I simply stuck the ring between two notches of the tripod mount and let the tripod rise to full height.

The results are stunning.

On the left: scanned with a flatbed scanner. On the right: shot with a camera and ring light and post-processed with GIMP (cropped, converted to grayscale and levels correction). It takes longer, as you still have to set-up your tripods, take the picture and post-process in GIMP (instead of simply hitting the Scan button), but you get a much richer output.

In the light of the upcoming GNOME 3, the more document-centric Shell and the browser-mode nautilus (instead of spatial mode), I wanted to remix my thoughts a bit.

Note: I am not a developer and I am not on the Shell or Nautilus teams. The idea of a desktopless environment was briefly raised on the Nautilus mailing list months ago and has hesitantly appeared at the end of the GNOME Shell Design Document, as quoted below:

Used for both ephemeral, and working set data finding and reminding. Given time, the constant stream of things to do, the constant remainder that does not get done, and the unwillingness to categorize and archive manually, and the fact that the solution doesn’t scale (due to being spatially bound) results in the system breaking down. On top of this – so to speak – is the problem that this data lives underneath all of the current activities on the computer and is therefore very difficult to reach. Which also tends to reduce its effectiveness for finding and reminding. It also doesn’t provide any form of prioritization.

In the Shell design, the “desktop” folder should no longer be presented as if it resides behind all open windows. We should have another way of representing ephemeral and working set objects.

The reminding function of the desktop is really only available immediately after login. Once any activities are started its effectiveness is dramatically diminished. Starting the Journal automatically at login will have a equivalent effect and have the advantage of being easier to access later.

However, I haven’t seen much more happening since then, and I believe this to be a fundamental question to settle. GNOME 3 would be, in my humble opinion, a perfect window of opportunity for an “intrusive” paradigm shift like killing the aging desktop metaphor.

I believe the concept of “icons on the desktop” to be counterproductive and perhaps counterintuitive. This blog post is a humble attempt at demonstrating why.

Windows obfuscating contents

Most of the time, the desktop is hidden by multiple windows. To access your desktop contents, you need to manually minimize your windows, hit Ctrl+Alt+D, or use the “Show desktop” panel applet (which probably won’t exist in the Shell anyway). Then, when you are done interacting with your desktop, you need to raise all your windows again. You keep moving things out of the way and putting them back in the way, all the time!

Alternatively, you could use nautilus to access the contents of the desktop folder, which defeats the purpose of having contents on the desktop. Or you could always keep an empty virtual workspace to switch to, but it quickly fills itself with windows and the cycle repeats itself.

Icons, visual clutter and cognitive strain

The Desktop is typically “designed” for transient files (though, as I’m arguing here, the vast majority of users don’t actually use it for its intended purpose). By transient files, I mean the following categories/scenarios:

• Files that I received or downloaded (through instant messaging, or files that the web browser auto-downloaded for me, for example)
• Temporary crap: blogging material, files to be attached to bug reports, files from bug reports, emails, etc. Usually files with a lifespan of five minutes.
• “Reminder” files, there just to annoy me into doing something about them.
• Files that I am currently working on (though, in theory, nothing prevents us from working on files that were already filed properly in folders)
• Files that are “waiting” for something (for example, files I would need for project X in 2 months)

The distinguishing lines between those scenarios is often blurry, to say the least.

The problem with desktops is that we, modern “information workers”, have heaps of data to process, and we have the following choices to make about a file (GTD/Inbox Zero fans will see that one coming):

• Process it immediately (and then delete or archive it)
• Defer it (“I need to wait 2 weeks for event X to happen before I can touch this”)
• Archive it (in that case, it should not be on the desktop)
• Get lazy and let it sit there

Oftentimes, this means items start accumulating on the desktop for weeks on end, waiting for the right moment/motivation/energy to be used. All this has a price. For some, it can be annoying to have all that stuff in your face all the time, or it can become a chore to “clean up”.

Ironically, the inverse tendency can also be true: the less there is, the more we are inclined towards piling up new stuff.

Keeping the balance takes determination and technique (not everyone is a GTD/Inbox Zero maniac). For less organized people, the desktop just becomes a dumping ground, full of “stuff” constantly in your face, “urging” you to be processed and reminding you that you should be doing something else but don’t have the energy or resources needed.

My point is a bit hard to prove here because, to some, it may look like I am advocating “hiding stuff under the rug”. For the sake of the argument though, I shall say that I have been running my computers without a desktop since 2007. This is what it typically looks like:

And this is what happens if I reactivate the “icons on the desktop”:

As a real world analogy, my current summer job involves office work. Pure, old-fashioned office work with actual folders, tons of paper, a hole puncher, stapler, and pencils. I process a couple of dozen cases per day, which means that my desk is a constant mess, with me pushing and pulling folders around, using aforementioned tools, throwing them back in the pile while I go fetch printouts, letting objects fall on the floor, leaving bits of memos everywhere, etc.

It doesn’t look exactly like this, but close enough:

(picture by Rob)

It is Hell.

Why would I ever want to reproduce this kind of chaos onto my computer screen? Isn’t it the computer’s job to give me unlimited storage and triaging capability for me not to shuffle things around constantly?

Text legibility

Partly due to Bug 317764, GNOME’s text readability on the desktop is very poor, to put it nicely.

As I don’t want to nitpick on a bug report that I filed years ago, I won’t comment further on the matter. Suffice to say, reading text without a solid, contrasting background is an accessibility disaster. Those who want to dig the matter can take a look at the bug report linked above.

Wallpaper enjoyment

Not only complex wallpapers impair text legibility (as mentioned above), but the reverse is also true: text and icons take away from your enjoyment of a good wallpaper because they add visual clutter. When I wrote my original article a couple of years ago, I had calculated that out of my 2500+ wallpapers, about 5-10% of them could actually be used with the traditional desktop metaphor.

Here’s the thing: our icons are mostly bright, and their text labels are bright too. Even with sufficient text borders (if bug 317764 was fixed), having items on the desktop interferes with the artistic complexity of most wallpapers in terms of clutter, brightness, contrast, etc. For that reason, only a minority of minimalistic wallpapers are truly suitable for use with icons on a desktop.

Incoherence with the “file manager”

By exposing the desktop folder as a special use case, we lose a great amount of functionality and break the consistency with “normal” folders; the desktop does not have the same features as the “full-featured” file browser Nautilus. No side pane, menubar, toolbars, no listview/treeview/compact view/infrared view, etc.

It made “some” sense when spatial mode was the default behavior, but it doesn’t make much sense now that browser mode is the default.

TL;DR/summary: the desktop metaphor sucks. We are stuck with a limited surface, limited file management tools, and a background that actively impairs legibility of the files sitting on it (unless you’re using a solid black background).

Not so intuitive?

The desktop metaphor is often presumed to be more intuitive to use, because:

• The user would interact solely with that desktop, thus see the entirety of his/her’s important files. This falls short for anything but the simplest use cases.
• Users come from Windows/Mac OS/Altimit OS and are used to the desktop metaphor. This is one of the eternal debates of usability, “Do we make drastic changes or do we keep everything ‘familiar’?” It struck me, however, that one day my mom asked me directly if those desktop folders could vanish! A similar observation applies to a couple of other relatives: I suggested disabling the desktop because it was a mess and… they actually agreed!

In my opinion, for someone who was not trained for using the desktop (others can be retrained, or brainwashed), not having a desktop does not make a computer less intuitive. Actually, I believe having a desktop increases the difficulty, due to the reasons mentioned earlier and because it creates “another” way to access your files and folders.

You can easily explain to someone that “Whenever you need to access some of your documents, you just have to access the Activities screen and click your Documents folder, or your Home folder”. Explaining why some things appear on the desktop but at different places in the file chooser or Nautilus? Not so much.

As a matter of fact, unless the gconf key “desktop_is_homedir” is set to True, the standard XDG directories (Documents, Images, Music, etc.) are not even located on the desktop, so the user has to use the Activities menu to access them anyway. Many users don’t bother. And many users have no abstract conception of the distinction between the Home folder and the Desktop folder. I have observed this time and again.

In GNOME 2.x, switching non-geeks to launching their Home folder from the Places menu is a bit of a stretch, since it requires more abstract thinking (knowing what files and folders are).

Things change with the GNOME Shell: the incredible elegance of the Shell’s concept is that it combines applications, recent documents and places all into the Activities menu, which is accessible simply by a flick of the mouse. This means that accessing the home folder takes exactly one click, and is much, much less painful. The fact that the Home folder can now be accessed so easily is one more reasons why I believe the time is right to get rid of the desktop. The fact that removable devices can be accessed (and unmounted) directly from the Shell is icing on the cake.

Back when I wrote the first version of this essay a few years ago, the ecosystem was different. We were in the middle of a stable GNOME 2.x series, with no revolutionary 3.x redesign at our doorstep, and the thought of advocating a desktopless GNOME 2.x as the default behavior didn’t even cross my mind. However, at the dawn of a groundbreaking release, I believe now is the time to voice one of my deep convictions: we ought to kill the desktop by default. This means:

• Set the key “/apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop” to False by default
• Set the key “/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir” to True (unless we have a new use for the desktop folder)
• Ensure that the interaction between the Shell’s and its places shortcuts is rock-solid: it needs to fully support dragging and dropping items onto places such as Images, Documents, Home, etc; it needs to be reliable in showing all the removable storage devices and reliable in mounting/unmounting them. Have 20 usb keys plugged in? They should all be easily accessible without even launching Nautilus.
• Eventually: complement this vision with tools like GNOME Activity Journal and the (experimental) idea of “project-centric” workspaces. Surely someone smarter than me will be able to come up with a brilliant solution to the eternal problem of “limbo/temporary files”; perhaps a zone where files have “expiration” dates and where users can “pin” files to prolong their life before they are either archived (put in another folder) or trashed.

What about “@Waitingfor” files?

As I mentioned previously, there are some kinds of files that you need to work on at a later time. Back in the day, I wrote a horrible, hacky python script to deal with this, called FrontBringer. Again, perhaps that the great minds behind the 3.x vision could come up with a better way to handle this use case, with files that you can “pin” or put in a “cryogenic storage”. Or something based on Lucas’ newly announced Board. Perhaps Guadec would be a great time to discuss these things (I will not be able to attend, sadly).

Gentlemen, start your flamethrowers.

“Sup dawg, I heard you like videos, so we put a previewer in your file chooser so you can preview while you choose your files so you don’t have to preview them in the previewer after having chosen them.”

Now, be aware that those changes are not yet official: they are in Pier’s own git repository and have not been thoroughly reviewed and merged in the master branch. There are probably bugs and rough edges left. This is where you, gentle reader in quest of adventure, come in and test the hell out of it. Play with it. Break it. Unleash the fury of the bleeding edge tester.

Some other notable bugfixes in pitivi git lately:

• Rendering WebM/VP8 now works properly (bug #621576)
• Aspect ratio was not preserved when rendering, resulting in letterboxing (bug #615569)

En tout, selon les statistiques de Hamster, de novembre à février, j’ai consacré plus de 130 heures à la maison à faire tout ça (ce qui exclut mes déplacements pour entrevues avec les professeurs ou autres).

Bien que j’aie eu un professeur m’appuyant dans toutes les universités où c’était nécessaire, un bulletin de notes arborant une moyenne de 3.6/4.3 (j’avais 3.7, ça a diminué) et un CV de président, ça n’a pas marché. Cinq universités m’ont refusé sèchement, et la dernière m’a placé sur une liste d’attente (42ième, alors qu’il y a 10-15 places disponibles…).

Bref, il vient un temps dans la vie d’un étudiant finissant où on pèse le pour et le contre de l’acharnement. C’est mon cas. Je ne regrette pas mes études en psychologie (et franchement, c’est fascinant comment ça change la façon de voir les choses), et je peux fièrement dire que j’ai essayé. Maintenant, s’acharner pour «tenter» de réussir à éventuellement passer dans l’entonnoir de l’admission, pour se taper cinq autres années d’études et ensuite déboucher sur le marché du travail (et peut-être avoir des surprises), peut-être pas, finalement.

Ainsi, je me suis inscrit au Certificat en administration pour l’année qui vient. Ceci risque, ironiquement, de me rapprocher potentiellement de mes intérêts de geek; ces dernière années, ma passion du logiciel libre, du design et de la gestion de projets ne s’est pas éteinte. J’ai quelques plans de tenter de rejoindre le domaine (dans un monde parfait, rempli de poneys et d’arcs-en-ciel), d’autres plans alternatifs, et au final beaucoup de spéculation quant à mon avenir. Je verrai bien où ça m’amène dans un an, moment à partir duquel je devrai avoir acquis mon autonomie.

Non, sérieusement, WTF? Suis-je le seul à trouver louche le fait qu’en dix ou vingt ans, les fraises aient quintuplé en volume? Ok ok, croisements génétique, OGM, etc… mais quand même. Tout est plus gros ces derniers temps en Amérique du nord (je sais pas ailleurs).

Les fraises, dans la nature (au Lac Saint-Jean par exemple), c’est maximum deux centimètres de diamètre, pas sept centimètres minimum!). Les bleuets* qu’on voit dans beaucoup de supermarchés font deux centimètres de diamètre (au lieu de 0.5-1 cm)… l’énormité ne relève plus de l’exceptionnel, c’est la norme. Dans quelques générations, personne ne saura que ce n’est pas la taille «naturelle» (prenons exemple de la sélection génétique de l’épis de maïs). Franchement, ça donne quelques frissons dans le dos et des pensées nostalgiques par moments. Quand j’étais jeune…

* contrairement aux fraises géantes, les bleuets géants ne goûtent habituellement presque rien. On dirait que c’est gonflé d’eau.

Depuis des années, je fais le soutien technique pour les membres de la famille qui roulent Ubuntu/Linux (j’ai une politique, à la Alan Pope ou à la Ploum, de n’offrir aucun soutien si la machine roule sous Windows). Pour la majorité de ces utilisateurs, je ne personnalise que très peu le bureau GNOME standard, parce que, bien que nécessitant quelques explications, ces utilisateurs ont déjà une certaine affinité avec le monde de l’informatique, et comprennent les principes de base sous-tendant l’interaction dans une interface graphique WIMP.

Or, le cas que je vous présente aujourd’hui est une exception, que nous surnommerons ici Alex. Alex est âgée d’une soixantaine d’années et n’a jamais touché à un ordinateur de sa vie avant que je lui en fabrique un avec Ubuntu. C’est dans des situations comme ça que l’on s’étonne de voir combien de choses, prises pour acquis pour la majorité d’entre nous, ne peuvent tout simplement pas être laissées au hasard ici, parce que dangereuses ou trop complexes.

Caractéristiques:

• Pas de conception mentale claire de fichiers/dossiers/etc. (ceci est commun à la majorité des utilisateurs “non-geeks/non-professionels”, pas juste aux non-ordinateuriens)
• Sa coordination motrice et son acuité visuelle sont problématiques (l’usage de la souris est extrêmement imprécis)
• Que ce soit le serveur X, les barres d’outils ou les tableaux de bord, si ça peut être détruit, ça va être détruit. Il faut que tout, absolument tout, soit verrouillé et cloué en place (utilisez le logiciel Pessulus pour arriver à cette fin). Exemples:
  • Alex fait ctrl+alt+backspace (ce qui tue le serveur X; j’ai été bouche bée de constater que les développeurs de Xorg avaient raison de désactiver cette fonction par défaut) parce qu’elle oublie de lâcher certaines touches du clavier. Ceci n’est plus activé par défaut.
  • Elle déplace des éléments des barres d’outils/panneaux sans le vouloir (puisqu’elle a du mal avec la souris; la moitié du temps, un “simple clic” se transforme en glisser-déposer)
• Considérez que les menus contextuels (accessibles par le clic droit) n’existent tout simplement pas. Si vous voulez que ce soit accessible, il faut que ça se fasse par la barre d’outils ou les menus.
• La liste des fenêtres est inutile. L’utilisateur ici ne sait pas et ne veut pas gérer des «fenêtres» (en ce sens, je comprends mieux le mot «Activités» de GNOME Shell). Le regard ne s’y porte même pas, c’est totalement périphérique. J’ai également constaté ce phénomène chez d’autres «non ordinateuriens»: je ne les ai pas encore vus une seule fois utiliser la liste des fenêtres.
• Une impatience marquée envers le temps de démarrage de l’ordinateur (ce qui est relativement rare parmis les gens que je croise); en ce sens, je suis bien content que ce dernier ait chuté considérablement dans les dernières moutures d’Ubuntu
• Lorsqu’un problème survient, ne vous attendez pas à avoir des explications claires ou des étapes pour les reproduire (qui plus est, le vocabulaire n’est pas assez complet pour pouvoir exprimer les idées).

Par dessus le marché, l’ordinateur en question n’a que 256 Mo de mémoire vive et doit nécessiter le moins de maintenance possible. Il faut qu’il soit blindé et léger. Dans cette optique:

• Le moins de processus au login possible: on retire Gestionnaire Bluetooth, Gestionnaire de réseau (NetworkManager applet), Notificateur de mises à jour (update manager), bureau à distance (s’il n’est pas utilisé), Ubuntu One, vérification de pilotes matériel (jockey), Mise à jour des dossiers utilisateur (xdg-user-dirs-gtk-update), etc.
• Un seul tableau de bord, avec le moins d’applets possible (en fait, rien sauf des lanceurs et un bouton pour éteindre l’ordinateur). Ceci contribue à réduire significativement la quantité de mémoire utilisée (et, indirectement, le temps de démarrage). C’est la différence entre 160 et 87 Mio de RAM utilisés au démarrage. Sur 256 Mo, c’est significatif, et ça implique moins d’utilisation du swap, donc de meilleures performances.
• Pas d’effets spéciaux: ce n’est pas le genre d’utilisateur à apprécier Compiz si, après tout, il ne «gère» pas les fenêtres; qui plus est, Compiz est une source de bugs potentielle et consomme des ressources du système.
• Barres d’outils simplifiées et personnalisées: il faut prendre le temps d’observer comment l’utilisateur interagit avec ses logiciels, et quelles tâches il veut réaliser courramment. Si c’est planqué dans un menu, ça risque d’être oublié. Ainsi, je suis bien content de pouvoir modifier la barre d’outils de Eye of GNOME pour y ajouter un bouton «Enregistrer», opération qui est nécessaire après que l’utilisateur ait utilisé l’outil de rotation d’image. Dans certains cas comme Epiphany, grâce à Pessulus, on peut simplifier encore plus l’interface en retirant la barre de menus, ce qui a également l’avantage de nous économiser une dizaine de pixels d’espace vertical (sérieusement, personne n’utilise les menus d’Epiphany sauf les geeks, et Alex n’a jamais utilisé les «Signets» dans les 4 dernières années).
• Un panel énorme (48 pixels de hauteur!) pour compenser les problèmes oculomoteurs de Alex et rendre les icônes plus faciles à reconnaître. Sur ce panel se trouvent simplement des lanceurs d’applications et un gros bouton pour éteindre l’ordinateur.
• Des barres de titre énormes: simplement changer la taille de la police de texte de Metacity permet d’avoir des boutons plus gros/accessibles (clé gconf: /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font = Sans Bold 14)

Un autre constat: l’ordinateur ne sert, franchement, qu’à accéder au web et à deux ou trois autres choses. J’avais auparavant installé une multitude de logiciels, espérant susciter un intérêt, tels que Homebank, Contacts, Tasks, GThumb, etc.:

Des années plus tard, force m’est de constater qu’ils n’ont jamais été utilisés (l’ordinateur est un «moyen» pour accéder au net, pas une «fin» en soi). Conséquemment, je les ai retirés.

Le résultat final:

Epiphany 2.30 et GMail:

Temps de login total from cold metal (incluant le bios de 15 secondes) jusqu’au login avec bureau gnome: 45 secondes (25 secondes du démarrage du kernel jusqu’à GNOME chargé).

Not in Ubuntu 10.04. For some reason, I have been unable to burn a single data DVD tonight.

Let’s see:

• I tried dumping one or two files into a blank data project in Brasero, putting a blank DVD+R in and hitting the Burn button. It seemed to work, then failed a few seconds after starting the burn process and dumped a truncated error log (not very helpful, but available further down below).
• Cursing the good name of Brasero, I promptly uninstalled it and put nautilus-cd-burner back in place, expecting it to do the job where Brasero had left off (Brasero was at least able to create an ISO image). And there came the surprise. Nautilus didn’t work either. That’s news to me. Wait a second. I remember K3B not working either lately. Uh oh.
• I then tried from the command line, with the following command: growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/sr0=GITS.iso
  • This worked with a (freshly blanked) DVD+RW.
  • …and then when I attempted the very same command with a DVD+R, it failed.

Is it growisofs’ fault? cdrecord? The kernel? Some other thing? There are so many pieces of software in the Linux CD/DVD burning ecosystem that it’s a maze for a non-connaisseur to figure out. And somehow, this is not very encouraging:

For the record, my computer is a Dell Inspiron 530n (ubuntu-certified desktop machine that has worked flawlessly so far) with an Optiarc DVD±RW AD-7200S. My Sony accucore DVD+R discs are the same ones I have kept purchasing over the years (the most reliable I have found).

Here is Brasero’s error log when trying to burn directly from a data DVD project, when trying to burn from a DVD ISO image, and here are my two attempts at using growisofs on the command line (DVD+RW = success, DVD+R = fail).

I’m stumped; I have wasted 3 blank discs and still haven’t been able to burn the data I wanted to give to a friend or even figure out why this is happening. Any ideas? Are there many users affected by this, or are we only a handful? Issues like these are hard to justify in an Ubuntu LTS release.

Update (2010 06 07): it seems the problem was Brasero creating incorrect ISO images. Trying to burn an existing ISO image works, so my drive, kernel, cdrkit/wodim/cdrecorder libraries are not to blame.