Ask Slashdot: What Does the FOSS Community Currently Need?

First time accepted submitter d33tah writes "In the summer term of my final year of IT's bachelor's course in my university, every student is obliged to develop his own project; the only requirement is that the application would use any kind of a database. While others are thinking of another useless system for an imaginary company that nobody would actually use, I'd rather hack up something the FL/OSS community actually needs. The problem is — how to figure out what it could be?"

Comments

The FSF has a page to answer this question

[Anonymous Coward]

High Priority Free Software Projects

Re:What OSS really needs...

[Jane Q. Public]

"And honestly it has to be because what the FOSS community really needs is some human interface design lessons."

Hell, Apple needs interface lessons. And Canonical. And...

It's almost like they have forgotten, or never learned, much of the human interface research of the past 40 years.

Take Apple just for example, though I don't want to pick on them particularly. When they came out with Lion with an understandable desire to bring their mobile and desktop worlds somewhat more together, they did "mobile" things on the desktop that just didn't make any human interface sense! Like making narrower scrollbars that no longer have any color, and disappear. And sidebars that no longer have color icons; they're all gray. And so on. "Upgrading" to Lion was a huge "WTF?" experience for me.

All of those "trends" are contrary to what we know about efficient human interfaces. Narrower scrollbars are harder to use. Greyed-out scrollbars are harder to see. And you have to wait for disappearing scrollbars to appear again before you can use them. Minus 3 usability points, for just one interface item. Removing the color from the scrollbars, and other similar things they did, are all definite steps backward in human interface.

Let's get it straight, folks: the 3D look was not just a fad. There were real reasons for it. Colors are important in efficient eye-hand coordination. Smaller and narrower elements are harder to use. And so on.

The sad fact is, Microsoft did a lot of, or paid for a lot of, research into many of the human-computer interface elements we use today. (A lot of it came from PARC, too, but Microsoft picked it up.) Then... apparently they threw away 20 years of it for Windows 8. Go figure.

PostgreSQL todo list

[leandrod]

PostgreSQL has a wonderful wiki todo list. Just pick your task.

My pet peeves are on domains, localisation, derived relations, and integrity constraints.

Re:Matching contributors to needs

[BruceCage]

It already exists: https://openhatch.org/

I registered a while back but haven't really bother to use it.