before the release. This is a time when users can peek over the wall, and have a say in what gets tossed over.
How do users know about these? I lurk on inkscape-devel and inkscape-user, so that's how I know.
- Currently: via website news, and theoretically via social media, but
this is often neglected (and possibly via news articles on software websites - for one of the pre-releases (pre3 or pre4?), I've actually contacted a news site, and it got posted - but as we got to pre5, I thought they might not find that too interesting any more, the numbers got a bit high for betas).
And I've been trying to post in forums, and Maren helps with that too. Lazur some too, from IRC (pretty soon, we'll have him convinced to subscribe to the lists).
It's been my opinion for as long as I've become involved with Inkscape, that there's more of a divide between users and developers, than perhaps developers want to admit. As I recently explained to someone, where the mailing lists and where irc are concerned, there isn't as much of a division. But in forums, the separation is shameful, in my opinion (think, Grand Canyon).
With a little guidance from developers, we could make those posts (about pre-releases and the need for professionals and other users to test) more prominent, and appear more important (than they do now). As it is now, these posts are practically just footnotes- sometimes just a single message. When we have the official forum, where we'll have more admin control, we can do much more. But even now, we should be able to make the posts appear much more important.
What would we need from developers? Something like how Tav explained about the gradient mesh needing testing, and including any related wiki pages and bug reports. Maren took that info and made great post, and that thread got a lot more attention than any of the other pre-release posts got.
Besides just notification about a pre-release, and where to get it, we would need to know which tools the developers specifically would like to be tested. Also where would they like us to report problems? (All the while I was posting bug reports on the gradient mesh tool, later I learned that there was a wiki page for bug reports (??).
Maybe there should be something like a notifications team, or similar? Release and other community-wide info would be given to the team, and each team member would post in their particular area (forums, facebook, twitter, IRC, website News, bloggers, etc.).
All best, brynn
-----Original Message----- From: Maren Hachmann Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2017 4:17 PM To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] User Involvement Was: Post-Mortum: Line height bug
Am 21.01.2017 um 23:56 schrieb Terry Brown:
On Sat, 21 Jan 2017 19:08:42 +0000 C R <cajhne@...400...> wrote:
We do have pre-release versions of Inkscape compiled and ready to test before the release. This is a time when users can peek over the wall, and have a say in what gets tossed over.
How do users know about these? I lurk on inkscape-devel and inkscape-user, so that's how I know.
- Currently: via website news, and theoretically via social media, but this is often neglected (and possibly via news articles on software websites - for one of the pre-releases (pre3 or pre4?), I've actually contacted a news site, and it got posted - but as we got to pre5, I thought they might not find that too interesting any more, the numbers got a bit high for betas).
Should Inkscape check for updates and show pop-ups like some other apps?
"New update is available"
and
" New beta is available
It would really help Inkscape if you'd test it "
realizing that that requires more code itself, an HTTP GET to find new updates, then the pop-up and instructions on how to proceed (probably just a hyperlink in the pop-up to the appropriate page on the Inkscape website).
Cheers -Terry
- A similar idea has been around for long (including all kinds of news about the project + asking for donations, too), but up to now I don't think anyone has started to implement it.
Regards, Maren
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