[ros-general] ReactOS UI Team - Concept, Plan, and: help wanted

[Aleksey Bragin]

Hi, our UI Team Coordinator - mf - asked me to sent this email on his  
behalf, because unfortunately mails from his address doesn't reach  
any mailing-list.

Here is the original message:
From: mf <mf(a)mufunyo.net>
Date: October 6, 2005 1:20:56 AM GMT+04:00
Subject: ReactOS UI Team - Concept, Plan, and: help wanted


Greetings ReactOS developers and interested parties!

For the unintroduced, I am your humble UI coordinator. In addition, I  
also made some graphics for the project.

-Concept-
I am here to remind you of a post that was made in the ReactOS user  
forum, written by crappish (Mikko Tikkanen). In it the author wrote  
of the need of a consistent user interface, the need of people that  
actually have knowledge of such things, and how these people would  
have to be in charge of enforcing such an interface. They should be  
familiar with Windows, know how to make things accessible and newbie- 
friendly, and have enough creativity to improve on existing concepts.  
In addition to that, there should be someone who represents this team  
and can interface it with the rest of the project, and make sure  
everything is the way everyone wants it to be. Now, this  
representative has been chosen. But there is no team to back him up!

-Recruiting-
So getting down to business. The UI team is recruiting two kinds of  
people.
Primarily: Programmers who have sufficient knowledge to hack other  
people's code, even if said code is rooted deeply in system  
libraries. Skill in writing user interfaces and piecing together  
dialog resources. No advanced skills beyond that required. This is  
most important, since developers in this category can get straight to  
business and get started on improving ReactOS.
Secondarily: Interface concept designers who have advanced knowledge  
of human interfacing, easy access, logical positioning, and the  
creativity to improve and expand on existing ideas. This is a  
secondary category because a) right now there is little to do in this  
respect, b) there are already two (counting Mikko?) of these people  
in ReactOS, and c) for every 1 concept designer, there can be up to  
10 implementing developers.
Even more appreciated, would be someone who fits both gloves and can  
write code AND design interfaces. Sadly, experience proves that these  
two traits don't usually come together in one person.

And! Just as important, though not actively recruited, I welcome icon  
designers, graphic designers, font designers (that includes you,  
wierd_w!), sound effect samplers, and programmers willing to  
implement missing UI features (think of things such as extended  
cursor/icon support, alpha blitting, runtime freetype configuration,  
recycle bin functionality, control panel, autorun support, etc), on  
individual application (mail me at mf(a)mufunyo.net).

-Plan-
The plan(tm) to kickstart the UI team is as follows:
Our first goal will be to make the surface experience of ReactOS  
familiar. Surface in this context means the things a user will see  
during and after bootup. This mainly involves modifying explorer; to  
display a consistent and familiar start menu, and to show a friendly  
explorer when My Computer or the Explore link is opened. This means  
making all the surface icons consistent (my task), modifying  
explorer's interface (the 'programmer' category), and figuring out  
the best layout for the start menu (the 'designer' category).
There is no plan past this first task, because I cannot predict how  
small or big the team is going to be, what feedback we are going to  
get, and how fast things will move.



And that's it for my first big announcement. I hope this will get  
some discussion going, and some balls rolling. I would also like to  
take this  opportunity to request a mailing list for the UI team,  
this should have been set up right after the coordinator vote was  
over, but it wasn't-- so to whoever's in charge of that, I count on  
you. Thanks.
Please reply to this mail only on the general list or to me in person  
(if you're not on the list and only get digests), it is only  
crossposted in ros-dev to get a wider range of attention.


Thanks for reading,
mf.