So one of my favorite bands is In Extremo, I particularly love Vänner och Frände which is a Swedish folks song and Óskasteinar which I readily presumed to be an Icelandic folk song. Yesterday I was looking again on YouTube hoping someone uploaded an original and indeed it was there. Now, this song hooked me, I was unable to stop listening to it, it was moving me close to tears.

Wish I had more time to prep for this talk. Nevertheless, it's very important.

The biggest problem with the Drupal 7 usability process is communication. To quote Bojhan "I think its essential to recognize that with how the feedback process was handled during D7UX, we demotivated a crucial group: our core developers". Indeed. Lost in the several hundreds of comments in this or that d7ux.org blog post and getting no feedback which we were used to in the issue queue caused a lot of people to throw up hands and walk.

Again in Bojhan's blog post "in most discussions, developers assume that design proposals are ill-informed…" to which Eaton answers in the comments "and designers, in most discussions, assume that developers are visually illiterate and uneducated about UX matters".

At DrupalCon I got many stares, photos and too few discussions about my keyboard and mouse so I thought I should do a quick writeup. The keyboard is a Kinesis Freestyle, which in itself is a great thing: it's a traditional layout split keyboard. You can set it to be shoulder-wide and then type in a much more natural position already. I have added an Ascent to it which allows you to set up the keyboard 20-90 degrees.

I am very excited to announce that our contrib sprint will have a very special guest: Damien Tournoud (DamZ). At last count, Damien had the most patches submitted for Drupal 7. He is one of our PostgreSQL and SQLite maintainers and had quite a role in the testing effort too. To all North Americans, here is your chance to meet him if you can't make it to Paris!

Drupal 7 is going to be frozen on September 1. Past that, we will fix focus on bugfixing and porting contributed modules. The so-called D7CX movement wants to see as many contributed modules as possible be ready by the time Drupal 7.0 is released. NowPublic fully supports this movement and to further it, we will hold a contrib upgrade sprint in the NowPublic offices in Vancouver, BC on the October 11-1217-18 weekend (rescheduled to avoid a conflict with DrupalCamp PDX). As usual, we provide wifi, power, pizza, drinks and... chocolate! Come by, it will be awesome. If you have not had the chance yet to learn about the new field API or the new database layer, this is an excellent time.

Because of a bug in the Drupal 7 PostgreSQL chain (either in PDO or the database) BIGINT handling is not fixed in today's Drupal 6 release. And you wonder why I hate that database.

It is no secret that the documentation of the form API is not in great shape. Today Merlin said on IRC that "the design does not lend itself to being well documented" and he is, of course, right. There were proposals during the years to convert everything to object oriented code but IMO that's too much in one fell swoop. I have the idea to use ArrayObject-based objects -- now that #type matters little -- and keep the current functions -- no methods. The properties will become doxygenable so the documentation is right there in the code, reusable by API module, IDEs etc. Here is some sample code.

While relatively few people will come and join the debate over deep coding changes, seemingly everyone knows usability and has an opinion. Moreover, there are usable yardsticks of what makes code good -- is it speedy, easy to understand, explandable? Usability is "soft" science. And then it's front end changes which requires JS/CSS coders and those are more rare than PHP ones. So there are very few cooks trying to make a meal, not even being sure of what while there are a lot of people yelling at them of what to do.

August 15-16, just two weeks before freeze. You can sign up here.