So, a bit back, I wrote a post about how Gallery have been focusing on making Gallery 3 easier to use.  So when Beta 1 came out, I gave it a go on my laptop.

Uploading images (first things first!)

After installation (which was a reasonably slick experience, although I was slightly confused by having to install apache2, php, and mysql first), Gallery neatly leads me through installing the first photos to my gallery. The browse dialog in which you select the photos you want to upload is slightly odd because as soon as you’ve selected the photos in the window, they start uploading. There is a ‘Done’ button but that seems to refer to having ‘done’ the upload, as opposed to having ‘done’ the selection of photos ready to upload – which is what I expected and was slightly surprised by the uploading starting before I expected it to. Wonder if this is intentional…cos it’s a little bit weird?

When the images have uploaded, they’re displayed in a tiled layout on the page (although, at the moment, the photos themselves don’t display – I guess that’s the joy of betas   ). The cool thing is that when you hover over a thumbnail, a small toolbar containing the most common tasks (edit, move to another album, set the photo as the highlight photo for the album, delete) appears over it. I did just try to take a screenshot but sadly I’ve forgotten my password so I can’t log back in…and the password reset function hasn’t been implemented yet…

Update: turns out I took some screenshots when I was playing:

Tags

Oo, can add tagz! (That *is* actually what I wrote in the notes I made.) You just enter a tag, one at a time, then press ‘enter’. Tags were the reason I was looking at Zen Photo when I became despairing of Gallery 2 (and wanted cool tags like I have in WordPress and Delicious, instead of just sorting by albums). It’s easy to manage the tags you’ve created from the menus (Admin > Content > Tags).

Album permissions

And then we get to album permissions. On Gallery 1, the permissions were slightly clunky but most could cope with them. On Gallery 2, the permissions were incomprehensible and when I googled for help I found other people who were similarly baffled and no actual answer to my problems. On Gallery 3, they’ve rightly got rid of the obviously UNIX-style permissions.

You can create different users and groups for your gallery. A reason for creating other users (who aren’t administrators) is so that you can section off albums so they can be selectively seen, for example, by family members, by friends, by work colleagues). When you create a user, you get the option to check the box ‘admin’ which presumably gives the user administrative access to the gallery. The users makes sense but I’m slightly confused as to the groups. I’ve nothing against the groups per se (I can see they might be useful for administrators of massive gallery sites) but I think groups should be an ‘advanced’ option that is not required for use by most people.

I can’t quite work out the ‘Registered Users’ group – it seems to get everything added to it apart from ‘guest’. I added TestGroup group and created two users (TestUser and test2) which I dragged and dropped to the TestGroup group. Worked nicely.

You set who can access each album by clicking Options > Permissions when that album is open, which opens the Edit Permissions dialog box. You then indicate the permissions that each group has on the current album. I like that you work by album but I’m not so sure about dealing with groups. I feel that it’s a bit of a ‘power user’ task to be working with groups – you have to have planned and organised your groups to be able to use this dialog effectively; it also adds a layer of complexity to understanding what permissions an individual user has.

Thinking of my friend who uses a gallery we host, she (and I) would find it a lot easier to work with the users themselves – maybe with a power user tab option to switch to working with groups. I’d much rather say that user ‘family’ can access this album, rather than set up a group called ‘family’ with a user called ‘family’ in it (there’d be little point, typically, to separate out different parts of the family to be multiple different users within the group). I agree that groups can be useful but I just don’t think they should be the default.

Slideshow

And finally, the slideshow facility (for viewers of your gallery rather than for you a gallery owner/administrator)  is provided by a third-party Gallery plug-in which is a little slow to load but you get the option to install a browser plug-in that gives you some client-side loveliness.

Overall impressions

Looking good.

As a long-time user of the Gallery software for our photo gallery, and having recently totally fallen out with Gallery 2 (the software, not the people who I’m sure are lovely), I am just a little bit excited to read about the all-new Gallery 3 version which is now in its alpha release cycle. In particular, this insightful paragraph which nicely sums up the fundamental problems with Gallery 2:

Gallery 2 does many things for many people and this diversity has made it unhealthy. The code base is too complex and over-engineered because it was designed to fix every single thing that was wrong with Gallery 1 (Second System Effect) leaving its scope hazy and broad. And while the Gallery 2 code supports DB2, MSSQL, and Oracle we don’t actually have anyone on the team that knows much about them, so there is nobody to fix bugs or add features in these areas. Gallery 2 was designed from the bottom up with architecture and design patterns first, so the User Interface and User Experience need a ton of work! This is shown by the huge number of strings and documentation that need to be provided in the product for people to understand it, and multiple attempts for tech writers to document Gallery 2 have all failed. Lastly, the product is immensely complex which forces developers to take months or years to get up to speed. This makes it very hard to attract new developers, and that makes us sad.

(Gallery 3 Begins)

This paragraph, in its analysis of where they went wrong in their approach to designing Gallery 2, could easily be applied to numerous other pieces of software; it epitomises the approach taken by so many software developers (both Open Source and proprietary):

• Not clearly identifying who the software is for and what they want to be able to do with it. And not sticking with that definition, with the result that the software tries to become all things to all people and fails everyone by being too complex.
• Reacting to, and implementing, every user request indiscriminately. Yes, listen to users but do not be led by their requests. Users are not designers. They just want to do what they want to do and don’t really care what other users want to do. Some requests will conflict with other requests. Which is why you must have a clear understanding of who your users are, what their skills are, and what their goals in using your software are. Only then can you make informed decisions about which requests should be absorbed and which should be ignored. You can’t please everyone but, as long as you know who they are and you’re careful to design for them, you can please the people who you want to use the software.
• Making the software difficult to maintain and support. Aside from lacking contributors to the project, it increases the risk that when updates are released, they break other parts of the software because no one in the development team really understands how everything hangs together.
• Expecting documentation to paper the cracks in the software’s design. Documentation (not just the manuals but the labels on the User Interface or the titles in a wizard) has an important place within the whole product but always check honestly for whether the documentation is really necessary or whether it’s just covering up for a dodgy bit of design.
• Assuming that User Interface is the same as User Experience. The User Interface (UI) is only a part of the User Experience. One example in both Gallery 1 and 2 (though it’s way worse in Gallery 2), is the expectation that users implicitly understand Unix-style permissions. The UI didn’t help but the underlying concept of Unix-style permissions makes the software (and the UI) so much more complicated than it needs to be. (Gallery 2 was way worse because I still can’t work out how to set permissions – and I do, to an extent, understand Unix-style permissions.)

I think it’s really cool that Gallery have openly recognised and acknowledged the problems with Gallery 2 and what they need to do to make Gallery 3 successful. The really hard part now, though, is to make sure that the development team don’t fall back into their Gallery 2 ways of thinking. That’s not to disparage the development team; it’s just hard to adopt new approaches. But it will get easier with practice. The clearly stated Gallery 3 list of priorities is encouraging and, while I’ve not looked at their progress in the alpha yet, I look forward to the first release.

InfoSlicer is a small application that enables you to download articles from Wikipedia, drag-and-drop sections of them to create new articles, and then publish your collection of articles for others to install or view on their own laptops.

The ideal of InfoSlicer is to support teachers in schools where access to books is limited. They can use InfoSlicer to quickly obtain content from the internet (maybe at a cybercafe rather than at the school or at home) and to create customized versions of the information that are suitable for their pupils and can be viewed with needing access to the internet.

Since completing the initial prototype, however, it’s become apparent that InfoSlicer could actually be more useful to the pupils themselves than just as a means to receive information created by their teacher. The children themselves could use InfoSlicer to download articles and then learn how to re-organise information for a specific audience or purpose and how to attribute someone else’s content without plagiarising it; the outcome of creating the articles is then less educationally important than the process of doing it.

So if you have Sugar, download the first version of InfoSlicer and give it a go (or just find out more) from: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer

Update 13th April 2009:

On re-reading this article (which was intended to be just a short intro to publicise InfoSlicer), it sounds as if I wrote the software myself! I didn’t. It was the outcome of the brilliant efforts of the InfoSlicer Extreme Blue team during their internship at IBM Hursley last Summer. Here’s a photo of the team at their Expo stand in Germany:

Jessica Vernier, Matt Bailey, Chris Leonard, Jon Mace

I’ve tagged this post as a ‘BitOfAWhinge’ because…it is. But bear with me; it’s got some random praise in it too.

I run Ubuntu Hardy on my Thinkpad T61p but (as I mentioned in a previous post) I use the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers so that I can have a decent resolution and use Desktop Effects. This works fine most of the time. Unfortunately, however, most times that I install updates that include kernel updates, the NVIDIA graphics modules become incompatible with the new kernel.

I guess that, were I running them, the Ubuntu graphics driver would be upgraded along with the kernel and this wouldn’t be a problem. As it is, though, after installing the kernel updates and rebooting, X (the graphics environment) takes some effort to load (on the computer’s part – not sure quite what it’s doing but it seems to be straining a little) before loading into a low, non-widescreen, resolution (bit like Windows safe mode). It also seems to revert to US keyboard settings so that certain non-alphnumeric keys are in the wrong place – awkward when entering a password that might contain them.

From there, I have to re-run EnvyNG (the nifty little app that goes away and installs the appropriate NVIDIA graphics drivers – or, in this case, probably just recompiles the modules or something), then reboot. And then everything’s fine. Today was about the third time this has happened. It’s not a major problem now that I know how to fix it but it is irritating and slow. The first time it happened it was quite concerning until I realised that running EnvyNG would fix it all.

So not very user-friendly. Better would be if the kernel update would recognise that there are other modules that are now incompatible (at this point you might be able to tell that I don’t really know how it works but that’s not the point) and, after installing but before rebooting, prompts the user that you’ll need to update them too (ideally with ‘and how to do that’).

VMWare have now cottoned on to this (yes, another proprietory app). Usually after a kernel update, you click VMWare Workstation to start and it just doesn’t do anything (again, rather concerning; if you know how to run it from the command line, you at least get a message that tells you to re-run the VMWare config script). Today, however, I got a little message pop-up saying that I needed to update the modules (or something like that) and I could press a button to do just that. It did it all for me and just worked.

So, some random praise for both EnvyNG and VMWare for making things easy to update. Minus points to Ubuntu Update Manager for not at least warning me that that would be necessary. I understand that by using proprietary software on Ubuntu, Ubuntu probably can’t (or shouldn’t) be held responsible for updating it, but it would be nice to be warned that I would need to run the updates myself.

Okay, not the most riveting blog post in the world but a start on my quest to have software developers (all developers; not just Ubuntu or even just open source) think a little and put in what might seem (to them) like niceties but which make all the difference to the user’s experience. Afterall, it’s for the user that this software exists at all.

Of course, just the thought of manually editing xorg.conf in this day and age shouldn’t even have crossed my mind. Especially on Ubuntu. But (as my Twitter followers might have observed) I recently acquired a new Lenovo Thinkpad at work–specifically, a T61p widescreen Thinkpad which, unfortunately, has an NVIDIA graphics card (really really bad open source support under Linux because NVIDIA won’t open up their drivers). NVIDIA, however, do provide proprietary Linux drivers which are far far better than the ATI drivers of my previous Thinkpad T41p (under either Linux or Windows).

Fortunately, while not a freedom-hater, I’m not averse to using proprietary drivers if I can’t make my laptop work any other way. And as this is my work machine, I need it to Just Work (or as close to as I can). So I installed EnvyNG (envyng-core, envyng-gtk) and ran that to install the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers. Incidentally, enabling the NVIDIA proprietary drivers listed in System > Administration > Hardware Drivers screwed up my graphics – I assume the drivers that Ubuntu thinks are right for my graphics card aren’t actually the right ones. EnvyNG, however, got it spot on–the widescreen display resolution (1920×1200) was automatically detected and worked straight off.

Ubuntu Desktop Effects (aka compiz)

This works pretty well. I had to look up how to enable, for example, the rotating cube (which is the ultimate desktop bling) which seemed to me to be a pretty bad Out of Box Experience (OoBE) – before installing Ubuntu on the Thinkpad, I’d booted once into Vista to check that the memory I’d installed was detected. In my brief visit, I noticed that things like the pretty semi-transparent sidebar and thought it’d be nice if Ubuntu did that without any effort on the user’s part (though, to be fair, someone else had installed Vista and, presumably, ensured it worked before shipping the Thinkpad – it would be possible to do the same for a pre-installed Ubuntu machine).

Rotating cube

My general opinion of the Desktop Effects is that while the effects themselves are amazing and a real step-up for Linux desktops, the Advanced Desktop Effects Manager, where you enable/disable the effects you want, is not incredibly easy to use. It’s often not clear what a given effect will do if you enable it. Nor is it clear what all the many many options for each effect will achieve. Really, we need a much simpler interface that has advanced options hidden away – something I’ll take a look at at some point…

The effects that I’ve enabled for now, and found useful/interesting/pointless-but-fun are:

By the way, Wobbly Windows are enabled by default. If you’re interested in knowing more about how Wobbly Windows came to be, here’s an interview with Red Hat’s Senior Interaction Designer (in 2005), Seth Nickell (PDF).

Enabling an external projector/monitor

Coming soon (as soon as I get round to taking some screenshots)…