Design/GlitterGallery

About GlitterGallery

GlitterGallery will be an amazing way to collaborate on design!

The goals are to allow designers to easily share their work, gather and parse feedback in a useful way, and version their work just as developers are able to.

GlitterGallery will be somewhat biased to support SVGs from Inkscape, and to work with the magicmockup rapid prototyping program. That doesn't mean it won't work with other filetypes, though!

History/Background

Designers have found collaboration to be PITA ever since the days of comic sans. At the GNOME hackfest in London in <date?>, some designers <Mo, Emily, who else?> got together to discuss a better way to discuss open source designwork online. Soon, DesignHub was born...

Sarup joined in last March or so..

Desired Enhancements

An awesome commenting system

Possibly the most important component of GlitterGallery is the way it helps understand feedback. It would useful to be able to support a commenting system that both provides socialization to some extent, while providing a way to distinguish useful feedback from the rest.

Things to work on in this direction:

• Likes/+1s/Upvotes for the comments. We need this to be implemented in a way that the entire page doesn't need a refresh.
• Threaded replies - let people reply to replies and so on.
• Mardown editor: currently, the comments support markdown, it will be really useful to provide with buttons to press for people who aren't used to writing in markdown. This feature can also be carried over to Glitterposts.
• Mark as issue: this is a very important area to improve on. It would be useful for the author of the project to be able to mark a particular comment as an issue - this could be transferred into the tracker for someone to work on.
• Overall UI - make the comment boxes expand as the user enters the comment, etc. Enable easy identification of project owner through tags or differently colored comment boxes.
• Allow references from commit pages etc

An issue tracker that works in sync with the commenting system

Things to work on in this direction:

• Sync comments to issues. When a user reports a comment as an issue, maybe it's a good idea to ask the user for some more information about the comment before checking it in as an issue, or maybe it isn't. Think what would be better in terms of UX.
• Allow project owners to let people take up issues.
• Allow refences on commits/pull requests, just like GitHub does.
• Integrate this with the user's email and in future, the GG notification system.

Socialization

Socialization is useful for people to be able to use the application effectively. While we don't intend to waste people's time by providing unnecessary feature sets, a minimum amount of socialization can go a long way in improving the overall design of the product.

Things to work on in this direction:

• Allow users to follow people, so they receive updates about their activity
• Allow users to follow projects, so they receive updates about progress of the project
• Notification system - for project owners to realize about pull requests etc
• Feed - that gives people updates from people & projects they follow
• Email integration - send out emails when new issues are reported, or when new pull requests are offered

Improved login

• Allow people to login through social media such as Facebook or Twitter
• Provide admininstrators with the option of only providing the kind of logins they allow

Better integration with Git

• The forking/merging process are currently ugly hacks that can be optimized through some code made available by the grit library
• GitHub seems to be moving to rugged, do we need to make the switch too?

Contributing

User Interface / Overall visual appeal

We need serious help improving the overall UI of GlitterGallery. If HTML/Stylesheets/JS are your comfort zone, you can be of a lot of help! We currently need help with getting over the hacky design. We've cleaned up quite a bit and GlitterGallery is fairly usable, but it completely lacks visual appeal.

These are things you could get immediately involved with:

• Typography - what fonts do we choose?
• color scheme - we have a pale & boring one right now that serves the purpose, but we'd love to see interesting proposals for color schemes.
• Interactions - JS ninja? We need all of those sliding panels, smooth transitions and dynamism that web apps can't do without today, too!
• Markup/layout - we need to layout our content better - does the idea of convering sketch mockups to working html interest you?