As for the Wiki, yes I could have subscribed the page. I should note, though, that writing this (long) post took me to revise it the day later, when it was ready I scheduled to be published two days later ( http://identi.ca/notice/4918685 ). That’s just to say there was no malice and the wiki page was mostly unchanged at the time of writing.

Projects are already benefitting from the Season of Usability (which Canonical sponsors), which is much more focused on usability than the Google Summer of Code.

The Gnome Human Interface Guidelines, however imperfect, have already substantially raised the floor of design quality in Gnome. (You are worrying about the ceiling, which is a separate issue.)

Canonical’s Design team has already, at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, run a daily Design Clinic that “let programmers collaborate with usability specialists” and helped numerous upstream projects. (And Canonical sponsors several of those upstream developers to attend UDS in the first place.)

Ridiculing complex design has already contributed to the simplification that led to the successes of Firefox 1.0 and Gnome 2.0.

And publishing mockups and design specifications early, to let volunteer testers understand what is supposed to happen eventually, has already helped with Notify OSD.

Meanwhile, Canonical is working on some of the other solutions I proposed (though not necessarily following my roadmap deliberately). We are introducing distributed version control for all Ubuntu packages, making it easier to produce variant branches of projects. We are beginning to set an example of projects having a lead human interface designer (such as myself for Notify OSD and AppCenter) alongside a lead programmer (Mirco Müller for Notify OSD, Michael Vogt for AppCenter). We are beginning to foster a community of Free Software designers in Ayatana. And we are working on establishing and publishing simple usability testing procedures that can be used even by small projects, to save development time in the long term.

Finally, you have badly misunderstood me in several areas. I did not say that anyone should “undertak[e] the pain of maintaining multiple versions”; I said that DVCS can help “someone to maintain their own variant of the software with the behavior they want”. It is not true at all that “Free Software is being looked as it was made by a company or payed developers”; on the contrary, I pointed out at the beginning of the article that “Many of these problems are with volunteer software”, and I concentrated on volunteer projects throughout. And it is not even slightly true that “Matthew seems even to advocate not letting people seeing the early results of the project work”; I didn’t write anything remotely like that.

I updated most of the AppCenter wiki page three days ago. If you want to keep up to date with changes to the page, you could subscribe to it.

No, your concerns are not any less valid.

You’re right, the more users use FLOSS the more the coders percentage will lower. That just means there will be more people with etherogeneous skills in the community to help with other factors, such as Documentation, Design, Usability etc.

> code talks, bullshit walks
As more users use FLOSS, less of the overall percentage will be able to code. I’ve used a FLOSS desktop (KDE) for over 5 years now and I cannot code, nor can the people to whom I’ve spread the Linux desktop. Are our concerns any less valid?

then I felt bad about that and started reading again, until I got to the warning:
> (WARNING: LOLcats randomly added to enhance usability)

i knew i was done then.

http://debreate.sourceforge.net/

which is, without personal offense to the author, is a crap interface. It might as well be terminal-based or configuration-file based. Interface != make a whole bunch of options be line inputs and comboboxes.

“Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed.” That’s true. There are few projects, mostly under the GNOME umbrella, that actually welcome better design suggestions. Rest are programmers thinking they’re better interface designers than a real designer.

“Coding before design.” That’s true. Most projects are like that. Then stuff keeps getting added onto in various places until a deadlock forces a complete rewrite. In fact, I even had one person want to start on coding right away! The intention is surely appreciated, but a plan needs to be set down first, and we agreed on that.