The majority of the semester will be spend working to improve the user interaction experience in an open source project. A number of excellent projects responded to my call for participation. Those projects follow below.
Communities
VLC
Video LAN Client is an incredibly popular open source project. It plays nearly every video format on all major operating systems. Since 2005, it has been downloaded roughly 500 million times.
[ WWW ]
Getting Things GNOME!
GTG is a to-do list manager that supports a GTD-style approach to time management. It is in the top 10 most recommended applications for Ubuntu, and ships on most major distros.Banshee
Banshee is a multimedia player for GNOME. Banshee has a large, active user base and development community. They would especially love it if we looked at some of the UI issues surrounding podcasting.
[ WWW ]
Gnomebaker is a free CD and DVD authoring app for Linux-based systems. Hamster
Hamster is a time tracking application for GNOME. The original author and maintainer of the application would love for us to engage with the project and improve the end-user's experience.
[ WWW ]
GCstar
GCstar is an open app for managing collections. Video, audio, games... you name it, it's for maintaining collections.Drupal
I don't know what I can say about Drupal — it's a massively deployed content management system. Our focus, leading up to Drupal 7, would be to look at plugin modules and extensions, where our input would likely have real impact at this time.
[ WWW ]
[ Usability Forum ]
KDE
KDE is... a desktop environment and software intended to provide a user-friendly experience on Linux. Although we can pick any number of places to make a contribution, KOffice has been suggested as a great place for us to dig in.
[ KDE WWW ]
[ KOffice WWW ]
UFO:AI
My hallmates and I rocked out to X-COM for many hours freshman year, and you could have knocked me over with a feather when I got an email from a member of the UFO:AI team.
I'd write more, but I have to... investigate the user interface for UFO:AI...
[ WWW ]
OpenMRS
The Open Medical Records System is widely deployed around the world, and user interfaces improves to it would not only benefit the project, but the lives of countless people around the world.
[ WWW ]
[ Mailing lists ]
Miro
Miro is an open-source media player. It handles torrents, podcasts, video, and everything else. It runs on all major operating systems and distributions.
[ WWW ]
Tahoe-LAFS
Honestly, I haven't fully figured out what the Tahoe-LAFS is. It looks like a distributed filesystem. They're particularly interested in looking at secure interaction design, and they provided us with a reference to a research paper on this topic.
If you're interested in digging into a project where you could have huge impact, and excellent work might even lead to future (research/study) opportunities, my suspicion is that Tahoe-LAFS is a great starting point.
[ Interface ]
[ WWW ]
Krita
Krita is an open-source program for sketching and painting. It is intended as a start-to-finish environment for digital painting by serious artists.
[ WWW ]
ImpressCMS
ImpressCMS is a community-developed content management system. They're an active community and are excited about working with students on improving multiple aspects of the workflows captured in their app.
[ WWW ]
Marble
Marble is a virtual globe and world atlas. They've recently added routing, and suspect that there are a number of UI improvements that could be made, both with respect to routing and elsewhere.
[ WWW ]
Serendipity
Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog app. It supports over 120 plugins, and uses Smarty for templating.
[ WWW ]
MyPaint
MyPaint is intended to be an easy-to-use open source graphics app for digital painters.
[ WWW ]
Amberdms
Amberdms is an open-source accounting, invoicing, and service management application developed by a core team homed in New Zealand. They've worked with student projects before, and would be very excited to work with us on improving various aspects of the Amberdms interface.
[ WWW ]
Moodle
Moodle is a widely deployed, open-source content management system developed specifically for use in education. For this reason, it is sometimes referred to as a "Learning Management System." We use Sakai, which is in a similar space in terms of functionality, etc.
Moodle's community manager dropped a line and said that they have some existing tickets in this space, and that the development community would definitely be welcoming if we tackled UI issues at this time.
[ WWW ]
[ Tickets ]
GPSBabel
GPSBabel presented us with a challenge. They develop, in part, a front-end that wraps up a command-line tool with over 1300 options (!!!). How can we help make this application as usable as possible?
This project is a bit different than others in its nature, but again, we have a good community looking to work with people who will help make their software better.
[ WWW ]
Red Hat Desktop Pieces-Parts
Richard Hughes from the Red Hat Desktop group is the primary upstream and downstream maintainer of PackageKit, UPower, gnome-power-manager, gnome-packagekit, and gnome-color-manager. He said he'd gladly welcome any of our efforts in helping him improve the UI of those pieces-parts.
Virtaal and Pootle
Virtall is a desktop translation tool, and Pootle is a web-based crowd-sourcing solution for software translation. Pootle is used to translate OpenOffice.org, Mozilla and growing number of commercial apps. They're interested in seeing what we can do to help improve their user's experience.
[ WWW ]
P2PU
The Peer-2-Peer University said they'd love our UI design help. It does appear to be an entire website. To that end, any group working with P2PU will need to work hard to refine the questions they have regarding usability.
[ WWW ]
openhatch.org
openhatch.org is a website that makes it easy for beginning open source contributors to get involved in projects. Asheesh is excited to work with us on improving aspects of the site, and can help a group refine their focus on specific tasks within the openhatch.org site/interface.
I know Asheesh personally, and think you'd have a great time working with him.
[ WWW ]
Gally
Gally is a program developed for sign language instruction. It's a one-person project, and it was developed as part of their senior project work. (This might sound familiar to some of you...) Mackenzie is excited to work with us, and knows that there are many aspects of the software that could benefit from your attention.
[ WWW ]
PhoneOrder
This is a tough one. PhoneOrder could use a complete overhaul... at least, that appears to be the thoughts of the author/team behind it. A lot of work on identifying needs will have to be done here.
Variations
Variations is a digital music library. It is, however, more than that – it encompasses tools for searching and annotating music in a way that music theorists and musicians want to interact with music, in both notational and recorded form. I'm personally familiar with the project, having been employed to work on it at one point in the past.
The people who work on this project are very accessible, and I think some really nice things could come from working with the Variations team.
[ WWW ]
