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i'm not dead yet, but i'm working on it.
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GIMP user documentation
Posted on
2025-04-24
by
aklapper
Over the last two years I’ve worked a bit in my spare time on the
user documentation
of
GIMP
, a Free & Open Source Image Editor.
While I personally still consider it pretty bad user documentation regarding style inconsistency, duplication of topics, “organic growth”, and lack of task orientation, I managed to put some lipstick on that pig across nearly 900 commits.
I was sometimes rather ruthless pushing my changes (plus I am only a simple contributor and not a GIMP developer) so I’d like to thank Jacob Boerema for their patience and lenience.
In particular that led to
pretty consistent and up-to-date user interface dialog screenshots using the default theme (a fun game in a repository with about 2000 images and no filename scheme whatsoever),
less trivial screenshots; people know how menus look like and all their entries are covered by accompanying text anyway (which created more work for translators),
all application icons updated to the default monochrome theme, in SVG format, located in one single directory within the docs repository, using the same filenames as in the GIMP code repository (so there’s theoretically a chance of maintenance),
Old default icon set
New default icon set
adding some icons to text because “click the fifth icon” isn’t particularly user-friendly (especially for
RTL
folks),
Button descriptions
Button descriptions, now with icons
slightly less quadruplication of string variants expressing the same meaning (which created more work for translators).
An interesting remaining issue is whether to remove outdated ancient
localized
screenshots and where to draw the line. Does having localized strings in the screenshot (not everybody prefers English) outweigh an outdated user interface in the screenshot (wrong numbers of buttons, or dropdowns instead of radio buttons)? Your mileage may vary.
Obviously there is much more to do, for example
maybe rewriting everything from scratch or
splitting screenshot files of translatable UI dialogs and non-translatable example images mashed into one single image file into two separate files because, again, translators and lower maintenance costs.
If you enjoy dealing with Docbook and all its quirks, see the
open GIMP help issues
or even write merge requests.
Posted in
gnome
lang-en
user-documentation
4 Comments
No more open tickets left in GNOME Bugzilla
Posted on
2021-07-10
by
aklapper
It’s already been
impossible for a while to create new tickets in GNOME Bugzilla
when GNOME moved to
GitLab
for bug reports and feature requests (and many other software development aspects, of course).
In May 2021,
Bart
proposed to
wrap up the Bugzilla migration
(very appreciated). In addition, in November 2020 and May 2021 I (had) sent emails to maintainers (listed in the DOAP files in each Git repository) of all remaining code bases with open tickets left, with instructions to file a migration request for importing tickets from Bugzilla to GitLab if wanted.
Since this week there are finally no open tickets in GNOME Bugzilla left. All were either migrated to GNOME GitLab or mass-closed over the last weeks by Bart or me. When mass-closing, an explanatory comment was added (
example
) to allow contributors to understand why we closed their ticket.
While two or three authors expressed unhappiness about closing their more than 10 year old open tickets, most folks seem to be aware of the constraints of free and open source projects, aware of the need for infrastructure systems able to fulfil modern software development needs, or simply don’t care.
Creating new Bugzilla accounts has also been disabled, as (to my surprise) some folks are quite good in ignoring large banners on top of websites.
This brings GNOME closer to making its Bugzilla instance read-only, converting to static content, shutting down legacy systems that create maintenance costs.
Posted in
bugzilla
computer
gnome
lang-en
2 Comments
Creating tutorial videos (the hard way)
Posted on
2020-12-21
by
aklapper
I recently created tutorial videos for
Wikimedia Phabricator
, the task tracking system primarily used in
Wikimedia
. These five tutorials cover the basics of creating tasks, working with projects and workboards, searching and listing tasks, and improving personal productivity. The videos are linked from the
the central Wikimedia Phabricator help page
and licensed under
CC0
There are different
types
of technical documentation: Overviews for understanding, how-tos for problem solving, tutorials for learning, API references for information.
And there are different personal preferences how to learn (oral, verbal, physical, visual, etc).
While I’m content with Wikimedia’s written task-oriented documentation (“As a user, I want to know how to…”), it was missing an overview (“What is this? How is it supposed to be used?”) in a format easier to consume.
So I started to plan tutorial videos.
Which preparation and decisions does that require? I’m not going to list everything but here are some pointers:
Understand what you are getting into: Watch
So you want to make videos?
by Sarah Ley-Hamilton for how to approach. Or mistakes to avoid.
Install graphical video editing software; learn and understand the basics.
I initially played with
Pitivi
as a graphical video editing tool. While it is quite okay for my needs (and I’ve started to sometimes use it for video editing), at that time I wasn’t fully convinced due to occasional glitches and user interface issues hard to reproduce.
I decided to give (non-graphical)
ffmpeg
a try. Which will only work out if you have raw video material which will not require to make exact sequence cuts on a specific millisecond. So you may want to use graphical video editing software instead. (Still, it was fun this way.)
Set up your system: Increase mouse pointer size, check how to visualize the pointer location (e.g. for mouse clicks)
Play with creating screencasts of browser content: Fullscreen vs window (the latter requires manually calculating the window’s width∶height to end up in 16∶9 after cropping, however while recording it allows you to see other open tabs to switch to), browser content zoom level, etc.
Sort out which information should be a screencast versus showing a static screenshot (intro and end slides, static webpages)
Plan what to cover. Write your script in a way that it can also be used as subtitles. Gather feedback (what’s missing or unclear?) and proofreading.
How much bling to have: Do I want to visually highlight areas, zoom in on videos, set up fade overlays between sequences?
Where and when to record audio without much background noise; is the microphone good enough?
The complete list of steps (setting up Phabricator locally, making customizations, creating test data, preparing the system, recording audio and video, cropping, merging, concatenating, exporting the final videos, creating subtitles, publishing everything) is
publicly documented
html source
).
Posted in
computer
lang-en
phabricator
user-documentation
wikimedia
2 Comments
Strike
Posted on
2020-11-11
by
aklapper
✔ GNOME Gitlab achievement unlocked
✘ Write something about ‘life-work balance’ here
Posted in
gnome
lang-en
2 Comments
GNOME 3.36 user documentation updates
Posted on
2020-03-12
by
aklapper
Looks like since the release of GNOME 3.34.0 in September 2019 I made exactly 500 commits in GNOME Git. :)
Localized screenshots shipped in GNOME 3.34 versus the same screenshot in 3.36
My main focus was on updating documentation. The user help of
cheese
gnome-klotski
gnome-mahjongg
gnome-nibbles
gnome-robots
gnome-terminal
gnome-tetravex
iagno
lightsoff
quadrapassel
rhythmbox
zenity
should be up-to-date in 3.36 again.
(If not, then
report issues
in
GNOME GitLab
with the label
“8. User Docs”
or
contribute patches yourself
.)
This also included updating a majority of outdated screenshots (both English and localized versions when feasible) across projects.
I also took the liberty to push quite some trivial markup fixes in some translations when a language was not already reserved for translation on
GNOME’s translation platform
(as such actions would interfere).
Enjoy 3.36!
Posted in
gnome
lang-en
user-documentation
3 Comments
Prioritization of bug reports and feature requests in Free and Open Source software projects
Posted on
2019-07-08
by
aklapper
A few months ago I wrote an
essay on software development planning in
FOSS
projects
. It tries to answer the following questions:
Why has nobody fixed this issue yet?
Why wasn’t I consulted about these changes?
How I can influence what is worked on?
Some parts of the essay are specific to Wikimedia but I hope it can also be useful for other communities. It is published under
CC BY-SA 3.0
so feel free to remix.
If you have a similar document for your project, please feel free to share a link in the comments.
Posted in
bugzilla
computer
gitlab
lang-en
phabricator
wikimedia
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on Prioritization of bug reports and feature requests in Free and Open Source software projects
Updating some GNOME 3.32 user documentation
Posted on
2019-03-28
by
aklapper
Apart from replacing many broken links to git.gnome.org or replacing links to GNOME Bugzilla with links to GNOME Gitlab in many code repositories and wiki pages, in the last months I spent some good time updating random GNOME user docs all over the place:
The user docs for
Rhythmbox 3.4.3
GNOME Chess 3.32
five-or-more 3.32
and
four-in-a-row 3.32
should be up-to-date.
The
Totem 3.32
user documentation is up-to-date and now in Mallard format, based on work started in 2013 by Magda and Kat.
The screenshots in the user help of
gnome-klotski
simple-scan
swell-foop
tali
, and
zenity
are up-to-date.
Updated hopefully all places which mentioned an application menu now replaced by a menu button.
Removed a bunch of unused help images from some repositories shipped for no reason and bloating tarballs.
Enjoy and check the
GNOME Wiki
if you are interested in working on user documentation!
Posted in
gnome
lang-en
user-documentation
1 Comment
GNOME Bugzilla closed for new bug entry
Posted on
2019-03-20
by
aklapper
As part of GNOME’s ongoing
migration
from Bugzilla to
Gitlab
, from today on there are no products left in GNOME Bugzilla which allow the creation of new tickets.
The ID of the last GNOME Bugzilla ticket is 797430 (note that there are gaps between 173191–200000 and 274555–299999 as the 2xxxxx ID range was used for tickets imported from Ximian Bugzilla).
Since the year 2000, the Bugzilla software had served as GNOME’s issue tracking system. As
forges
emerged which offer tight and convenient integration of issue tracking, code review of proposed patches, automated continuous integration testing, code repository browsing and hosting and further functionality, Bugzilla’s shortcomings became painful obstacles for modern software development practices.
Nearly all products which used GNOME Bugzilla have moved to
GNOME Gitlab
to manage issues. A few projects (Bluefish, Doxygen, GnuCash, GStreamer, java-gnome, LDTP, NetworkManager, Tomboy) have moved to other places (such as freedesktop.org Gitlab, self-hosted Bugzilla instances, or Github) to track their issues.
Reaching this milestone required finding, contacting and discussing over the last months with project maintainers of mostly less active projects which had used GNOME Bugzilla for their issue tracking.
For convenience, there are redirects in place (for those websites out there which still directly link to Bugzilla’s ticket creation page) to guide them to the new issue tracking venues.
Note that
closing
only refers to creating
new
tickets: There are still 189 products with 21019 open tickets in GNOME Bugzilla.
IMO
these tickets should either get
migrated to Gitlab
or mass-closed on a per-product basis, depending on maintainers’ preferences. The long-term goal should be making GNOME Bugzilla completely read-only.
I also fixed the custom
“Browse” product pages
in GNOME Bugzilla to get displayed (the previous code expected products to be open for new bug entry). Should make it easier again for maintainers to potentially triage and clean up their old open tickets in Bugzilla.
Thanks to Carlos and Andrea and everyone involved for all their help!
PS: Big Thanks to Lenka and everyone who signed the postcard for me at FOSDEM 2019. Missed you too! :)
Posted in
bugzilla
gnome
lang-en
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on GNOME Bugzilla closed for new bug entry
Wikimedia in Google Code-in 2018
Posted on
2019-01-07
by
aklapper
Newcomer
and
Mentor
stickers designed by
GCI
2017 participant
Ashley Zhang
CC BY-SA 4.0
Google Code-in
(GCI) is an annual seven week long contest for 14–17-year-old students exploring
free and open source software
projects. Organizations, such as the
Wikimedia
community, offer small tasks in the areas of code, documentation, outreach, research, and design. Students who complete tasks receive a digital certificate and a shirt from Google. The top students in every participating organization win a visit of Google’s headquarters. Students can directly experience how large online projects are organized, collaborate with humans across the planet, and the students’ accepted work is made available to millions of worldwide users.
For the sixth time, Wikimedia was one of 27 participating organizations which offered tasks mentored by community members.
In late 2018, 199 students worked on 765 Wikimedia tasks with the help of 39 mentors. To list only some students’ achievements and show the variety of projects, areas, and programming languages in the Wikimedia community:
VisualEditor
now allows editing a table cell by pressing F2; Several fixes for the “Page Options” dialog; Leading spaces from the “format” field in
TemplateData
user interface are now stripped
Documentation written
how to use our Gerrit test instance
More
unit tests
in MediaWiki’s
Thanks
and
StructuredDiscussions
extensions
Code coverage
: Several MediaWiki extensions got missing @covers tags added
MediaWiki web upgrade process
now handles errors in purgeCache correctly
Improved the workflow in MediaWiki web installer if an error occurs
MediaWiki Action API
now
returns HTTP 405 error code when an unsupported http method is used
Included namespace information on the action=info page
The
Wikimedia Hashtags tool
on
Toolforge
now has a JSON endpoint
The
Wikinity tool
on Toolforge now
has a coordinate format converter
Pywikibot
now
removes disambiguation brackets
in labels to create new items for articles in Wikidata; unused code removed in some places
Several fixes and improvements for the
JSDoc WMF theme
Several MW extensions now
display their licenses on Special:Version
Several students took incremental tasks to learn
Lua
and templates
Sticker designs, such as
racconicorns
or “Personal Space Needed”
Constructed SQL queries in
Quarry
to get statistics about Wikipedia
Dozens of fixes & new features for
WMCZ
‘s expense tracking app “Tracker”
In the user interface of the
Wikidata Query Service
the placeholder now updates the language dynamically
and code examples were improved
Added support
for the Eastern Pwo language (kjp) to MediaWiki’s Names.php
Mobile frontend
Minerva skin
: The “Edit” button is now disabled for anonymous editors; Control-clicking on an image now opens the image in a new tab; Moved client side code inside initEditLink to server; Category overlay in MediaWiki’s MobileFrontend extension now refreshes after a category was added to a page
Some
Wikimedia site configuration changes
were prepared (and
deployed
) by students
WikiEduDashboard
: Now shows file urls and author in ‘Recent Uploads’ on user profile pages; `no-undef` eslint rule enabled; users now get informed when a course is not listed in any campaigns
FormWizard extension
: Extension group on special page modified and further small fixes
Modified the
‘issue announce’ summary textbox
Removed unchecked calls
to Title::getTalkPage in MediaWiki extensions
Replaced
usage of jshint/jscs with
eslint
in numerous MediaWiki extensions
Some
guided tours
created for MediaWiki’s StructuredDiscussions extension
Some fixes for syntax errors in translated messages in MediaWiki and extensions
Images (corresponding to an emoji)
added
to Wikimedia Commons Twitter Bot code
Musical partitions transcribed
for various Wikipedia articles.
…and many many more.
Some students have also
written about their experience
Google also posted a summary with statistics
We would like to congratulate
our winners Nathan and Shreyas Minocha, our finalists arcaynia, Jan Rosa, takidelfin and Zoran Dori
, and all contributors on their many contributions! We hope to see you around! We would also like to thank all our mentors for their commitment to be available also on weekends and holidays, for coming up with task ideas, working together, quickly reviewing contributions, and for providing
feedback
what we could improve next time.
Thanks to everybody on IRC, Gerrit, Phabricator, mailing lists, Github, Telegram for their friendliness, patience, support and help.
Wikimedia always welcomes contributions to improve free and open knowledge.
Find out how you can contribute.
Posted in
lang-en
wikimedia
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on Wikimedia in Google Code-in 2018
Google Code-in 2018 and Wikimedia: Mentors and smaller tasks wanted!
Posted on
2018-09-13
by
aklapper
Google Code-in
will take place again soon (from October 23 to December 13). GCI is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students to start contributing to free and open projects. It is not only about coding: We also need tasks about design, documentation, outreach/research, and quality assurance. And you can mentor them!
Last year,
300 students worked on 760 Wikimedia tasks, supported by 51 mentors from our community.
Your gadget code uses some deprecated API calls?
You’d enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
You’d welcome some translation help (which cannot be performed by machines)?
Your documentation needs specific improvements?
Your user interface has some smaller design issues?
Your Outreachy/Summer of Code project welcomes small tweaks?
You have tasks in mind that welcome some research?
Note that “beginner tasks” (e.g. “Set up Vagrant”) and generic tasks are very welcome (like “Choose and fix 2 PHP7 issues from the list in this task” style).
If you have tasks in mind which would take an experienced contributor 2-3 hours,
become a mentor
and
add your name to our list
Thank you in advance, as we cannot run this without your help.
Posted in
lang-en
wikimedia
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on Google Code-in 2018 and Wikimedia: Mentors and smaller tasks wanted!
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disclaimer.
The opinions reflected here are obviously my own. They are not the views of my employer or anyone else.
license.
This work by
Andre Klapper
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
unless otherwise explicitly noted.
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