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.

A couple of years back, a friend from work was doing an AS level in photography in her spare time and was given a piece of coursework to complete over Easter. So she figured it’d be a good chance to have a girlie day out and we (me and some other work friends) could be her models.At first we were slightly apprehensive about exactly what we would be modelling… But she soon put our minds at rest and said we’d be going up to Avebury standing stones for the day to pretend to be fantasy warrior characters a la Lord of the Rings etc.

So one windy Sundy in April, Katja, Tess, me, and Keren (as shown in the piccie to the right) dug through the supplied sack of costumes to create ourselves as characters for the photoshoot. We spent much of the day running around fields with plastic swords (or, in my case, the extremely sharp dagger that you can see in the photo).

We had a great time but as the day went on, we got more and more tired and cold, which probably added some authenticity to the scenes.

The best of the photos are tagged avebury on Flickr. My friend passed her assessment and we all went along to the exhibition and felt just a little bit important as we wandered around and admired ourselves on display.

p.s. And while we’re on the subject, I quite like this one, which isn’t tagged as avebury but is the result of my friend more recently playing with her graphics package. I like the soft-focus, air-brushed effect.

Piccies here: www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hci2007/

I’m a newbie to Flickr and it took me some time to work out what exactly I wanted to do with it. I created a group for conference delegates to upload their photos to. But, having just finished uploading my photos, I think it’s easier just to stick with tagging. Happily, there seem to be several people who have used the same tag ‘hci2007′ for all their HCI 2007 conference photos on Flickr. So if you follow the link above you can find them easily.

Including pics from Elizabeth Churchill who was one of our three excellent keynotes. The others were Stephen Payne and Jared Spool (Jared outdid my hopes and expectations by being incredibly funny and entertaining while still being very relevant and interesting.). All three were excellent not only because they did great presentations but because they attended as much of the rest of the conference as they could and actively participated in sessions, in particular Elizabeth who seemed to be on every panel going!

Oh, and here’s The Purple Press blog…

In response to a comment on my previous post, here’s what happens when I plug in my camera and switch it on (in Playback mode) under Ubuntu Linux Dapper:

Then, when I click Import Photos, I get this dialog:

You then just select the thumbnails of the photos that you want to import to your harddrive and click Import. It automatically creates a directory in the location shown using the current date and time.

Much the same sort of thing happens under Windows XP and Mac OS X because they all use the PTP transfer protocol.