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Displays - Large and small

ho: How well do you think GNOME is adapting to the smaller screen space of netbooks? Will there be a simple "small screen" detection mode in the future to reduce the need for the user to customise fonts?

VU: That's actually a design goal of GNOME Shell: we want to have its concepts working well on smaller screens like on netbooks, so there should be no major settings to change there.

To answer specifically the example you gave with fonts: I actually don't know if it's possible to do some magic with auto-detection and automatic change of fonts in this case. There's a delicate mix between the screen size, the DPI of the screen, the taste of the user (yes, people can disagree on when a font looks best)... and the eyes of the user – I'm not sure people would want to use a desktop where everything is too small to be readable by default. But it's something that can be worth investigating, indeed.

On a more general note, we already have people working on fixing our applications today. For example, Eye of GNOME (our image viewer) and Cheese (a really cool application for webcams) have a netbook mode that is used by default for GNOME 2.28. While there might still be some issues here and there (I know of one dialogue that doesn't fit on a netbook screen, ouch!), we're progressing nicely in this area and GNOME is working quite well on those machines.

ho: Conversely, how well do you think GNOME is taking advantage of bigger screen sizes on the desktop?

VU: It's working quite well already, I think. The main issue that exists is that generally, a maximised window is just way too big, and tiling windows can be more appropriate. You can already do this today with small tools like WinWrangler; for GNOME Shell, it's a feature that is part of the design, but not implemented yet, as far as I know.

ho: How is GNOME Mobile coming along? Where does it fit in with initiatives like Moblin or Android?

VU: The GNOME Mobile initiative is doing great! The GNOME platform is used on various platforms, from Maemo to Moblin, from GPS devices to medical hardware. It's already out there in released products, and it will be even more used in the future!

What we provide with GNOME Mobile is actually two-fold:

• A forum (as in "place where people can discuss", not as in "web forum") where people from the industry can cooperate, while they're competing outside of GNOME Mobile. This was unexpected by us, but we provide a neutral place to discuss technical topics, and it turns out to be something organisations needed.

• A software stack that organisations can take to then build a complete platform for their devices. With the GNOME Mobile platform, we don't position ourselves as a provider of a complete platform (like Android, Maemo, or Moblin do), but as an enabler. So we're not really in competition with those platforms; on the contrary, we're generally trying to work with them!

While we don't have any specific relationship with Android, we're quite close to Moblin. Many people working on Moblin are part of the GNOME community, and Moblin and GNOME really share most of their respective platform. Did you know that the shell in Moblin is based on Mutter, like GNOME Shell? We're similarly close to the Maemo community, which has been working with us for quite some years now.

I'm personally quite excited about Moblin: it looks gorgeous and it's really designed to let users do what they want to do. It's completely in phase with the GNOME philosophy.

Next: Code clean-up

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