The last post seemed to get some attention. I also think it has been misunderstood. So I would like to briefly reframe it.
It wasn’t a rant about GNOME Shell or about design driven development. Neither was it a dismissal of the urgency for a strong developer story. I like the fact that we take risks and innovate in design. I also think that our developer workflow is broken, and fixing it is a priority.
To sustain a healthy project and community, we need a mission. This is not news, and we have articulated our mission in the past. But I think it should be re-evaluated all the time, and tested against the real world. When we choose our mission, I think we could do better than blindly chasing the elusive User to the next frontier. I think we could re-evaluate our role in this ecosystem.
New magic gadgets are coming out every day. They have large screens that let you directly interact with the content displayed on them. Did I say magic yet? They are truly magical. They are very good at hiding all the nitty details. In fact, they do a really good job at that. Too good.
When I was first introduced to the web in ’94, I thought “Cool the Louvre has a virtual home. I want one too.” I was able to sit at that same computer where I witnessed that wonder and create “Eitan’s Slime Pit”. We are not far from a reality where a kid would look at the world through their tablet, enjoy their magical digital life, and have no means to truly create their own presence on the web or to author their own app.
This is where I think we should be. We should be a free and accessible environment that enables creation. I think that is an important and critical mission in the Free Software Movement.

I wanted to give my one cent about the GNOME project, and where I think it could be successful. It would be two cents if I were actually involved in any constructive manner, but I am not. So it is one cent.
Ever since I started contributing to GNOME, the looming questions have been mobile, web, and social. Every keynote at GUADEC has tugged us in that direction, or promised to “reboot” the effort. If it is Big Board and Mugshot, Pyro Desktop, Telepathy and the collaboration it was supposed to bring, the countless OpenedHand and Nokia innovations, etc. We have all been running around like a chicken with its head cut off ever since I remember, trying to capture the essence of these new trends and remain relevant.
We failed.
Apple revolutionized not just mobile, but reinvented the mainstream computing form factor. Facebook made “social” ubiquitous, and Google is doing what it is doing to the web. In the meantime, I never gained any following on Last.fm from all those years of scrobbling music with Rhythmbox and Banshee, I never got an opportunity to use Telepathy tubes with any real live person, and apparently my Mugshot profile is gone. My eyes also got tired of squinting at XTerm on my N900.
Last year in Berlin, the lack of direction was apparent. Almost every keynote that I remember was given by one kind of designer or another. Somewhere along the line we confused design with leadership. At least there wasn’t as much self delusion about our bright future on mobile.
But there is a way out of this rut. And it requires acknowledging our weaknesses and exploiting our strengths.
Our weak areas are apparent: We are not mobile and we are very far from it. We will never achieve any significant social critical mass, we have had limited successes in embracing web technologies, but the web will always be a better web. Deploying “apps” is a nightmare.
Our strengths are pretty obvious too: In the last few years we successfully refreshed the desktop work flow and our entire framework. We support many productivity and authoring tools. We created a distraction free environment that lets users get work done. We run on commodity hardware. We are free. We have a windowed multitasking environment. We work really well with a screen, mouse and keyboard (not to be taken for granted, look at all the awkward Android tablet keyboard combos out there). More than one web browser supports us. There is a more than fully functional office suite that works well with us. Etc.
So instead of aspiring to be in every consumer gadget out there, I think we should aspire to be the work horse of choice for every content creator out there. This includes mobile/web developers, graphic designers, artists, bloggers, video bloggers, authors, journalists, podcast producers, and every other kind of content creator that makes the mobile web and social such a vital space for the rest of the world. We need to refocus on the desktop.
Let’s leave the mission of bringing free software to mobile and the web to others. Other groups are doing a great job there. They are in their element; let’s remain in ours. We should focus on the production end of the New Media pipeline.
Projects such as The GIMP, PiTiVi, Anjuta, Blender and Libre Office should be our bread and butter. We should strive to stay ahead of the curve on the authoring end. We should document and support Android and Unity development. The Wacom tablet support that landed recently is a good example of what we could be doing.
It feels like GNOME is being maintained by a skeleton crew, and a shrinking set of corporate stakeholders. I think it is time to be realistic about what we could excel at, and go there. We don’t have to be on every existing form factor to achieve world domination. The cloud, and all these cheap new gadgets have lowered the barrier to access. We could lower the barrier of authorship, and enable people to create new and rich content.

I didn’t go!

When I finally rolled up my sleeves and turned from a user to a contributor, my main interest was GNOME. Everybody was saying back then, in 2005, that the desktop is done with. The future is the web, the future is mobile. But I was stubborn; I loved the user-centered attitude in GNOME and the fantastic governance and community. I found myself working on accessibility for users with disabilities and loving it.
But here I am now, in my day job at Mozilla. Still doing accessibility, but focusing exclusively on the web, and on mobile. Yet I remained a GNOME enthusiast, and I always wait anxiously for the releases that come out twice a year when I need to try out every new feature.
It isn’t just an emotional thing. This has all gelled for me in a comprehensive analysis of the role of Free Software, and it goes something like this:
The web is important, it is a basic utility that everyone has a right to, and one company, or a consortium of them cannot hold any type of exclusivity. This is the internet that I and many of my peers first discovered in the 90s before the dot-com sleaze, and it is still the core of the internet today. The next billion users will discover the web through cheap mobile devices on a slow cell data network. They will never own a laptop, or have broadband access. The question is, will they have the same experience I did in the 90s, or will they be introduced to a limited walled garden that the phone manufacturers or carriers introduce them to? I see that as part of Mozilla’s core mission today, and it is what appeals to me. It is not a first world problem any more, and it is not primarily on the desktop any more.
So why is the desktop important? And why is GNOME important? Liberating users from corporate monopolies is one thing, but we need to liberate content authors as well. To produce quality content and applications for the web, we need to provide a free set of tools for doing it. The Free Desktop gives us that. It gives us GIMP, PiTiVi, and countless other tools with an appealing and comfortable environment that is designed to let us get work done. No need for Apple or Adobe, just some commodity hardware and you have a shop ready to get your message out there and make a difference. That is the empowering message of the desktop.
So to all the GUADEC regulars: I miss you guys. Maybe next year?

I just landed the final set of patches that will enable explore by touch for Ice Cream Sandwich screen reader users. If you use our nightly builds, you should probably see this feature in Tuesday morning’s build – if it all works out.
One of the things that I am most proud about is our focus on the core Android accessibility experience. Being “accessible”, is more than just providing a rich set  of accessibility features (although we are committed to that too), it is about allowing the user to get Firefox from the Play Store, and start using it immediately with no extra “self-voicing” extensions, no extra settings and checkboxes, and no new special gestures and interaction modes to learn. When a user with a disability purchases an Android phone, they will go through the painful process of learning how to use it and customizing it for their needs. When they install Firefox, they should be able to put the knowledge and muscle memory they acquired for every other task on the phone to browsing the web as well.
When accessibility is done right, it could be downplayed, and make space for the actual application you are using. In our case it is Firefox for Android. The positive feedback we are mostly getting from the blind community has not been about our accessibility features at all, but about the browser. The fact that Firefox for Android is fast and responsive, supports Flash, and syncs with your desktop tabs did not get “lost in translation”, it is the primary appeal for blind users just as it is for sighted users.
Why am I mentioning all this in regard to explore by touch? Because introducing this feature brings us one step closer to doing it right. Explore by touch works exactly the same in Firefox as it does in the rest of your Android TalkBack experience, move your finger around the screen and have the web content spoken to you, raise your finger and single tap to activate a link or control. Scroll with two fingers and hear the scrolling pitch change. There is nothing new here, just the same old experience you are used to in your Ice Cream Sandwich phone. Now go explore.