gnome achievements – the alternative

GNOME News 18.08.2010 12:15 The point of this post is to make you aware that there are more projects tackling with trophies than just Seif Lofty’s zeitgeist plug, and with much more serious intentions. I’m asking to give it a little more time before you think about integrating your app, as we might have something more real, more serious and more to the point. Not there yet, obvisouly – it’s missing bling, polish and refinement. We’ve already asked for trophy icons from the design team and Lapo Calamandrei stepped up, so that’s in progress.   I guess most of you have seen Seif Lofty’s on planet gnome about having written twenty lines of code. The project is much older, although the code backdates just about a week before the omg saga. The gnome-achievements project has a single goal and that is to enable users to discover application features. Fun is a side effect of that. For example in hamster – it is hard to expose some specific features in the UI – like entering negative minutes to start activity in past, or the fact that you can override the default report. It is documented in help and linked as contextually as possible – but often one won’t even realize that there is a better way to do things. And so enter trophies. If you know negative deltas, then after doing it a number of times you will get a trophy. Maybe you will say “hey – what was that about” and go into trophies and stumble upon more interesting ones. Or maybe, if you don’t know negative deltas – you will stumble upon them via some other trophy or by deliberately opening the trophy browser. We have come up with so far, out of which 34 seem to be viable right now. The current progress is that the service is there, there is a rudimentary browser and now i’m working on putting the trophies in hamster. The plan is to gain insight while doing that and write a first draft of guidelines. There are many questions to be answered and the whole system, being so different from video games, has to be rethought. Do ranks make sense on desktop? Should hidden trophies be included in the interface if there is such a large proportion of them. And so on. After that the plan would be to approach developers of some other project and with them try bring trophies into their app and see what bits are missing. And after a few more trials then we go public. It shouldn’t take too long – a month or two perhaps. Apart from coming up with guidelines, which i think are crucial to be relevant, the trophy system itself will try and offload as much of trophy related state-tracking, as possible. Anyway, it’s not a release yet, and you can see commits happening actively both on hamster side and on gnome-achievements. You can also see things coming and going, so this is not the point where you plugin in yet. There will be a proper announcement when we are there. As for the duplication of effort – there was a quick discussion when Seif came out with the first announcement, but with the most recent one he has went into full denial, avoiding linkage or responding to my comments. I think it’s not a race anyway, and in longterm whatever makes sense, will survive. I am following their progress too, so no worries – it seems to me that the whole effort is slightly lagging behind gnome-achievements due to lack of focus. Finally, we do plan to get into GNOME eventually. And there is such intent because i firmly believe that this makes sense. If interested, and check out the code.

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