Helsinki SDK sprint

We arrived in Helsinki on Sunday evening, ready to start our week long SDK sprint on Monday. Our hotel was in a nice location, by the sea.

The work stuff

The SDK is a core part of Ubuntu and provides an array of components and flexibility needed to create applications across staged and windowed form factors, with good design and user experience in mind.

The purpose of the sprint was to have the designers and engineers come together to work on tools and components such as palette themes, bottom edge, header, scrollbars, focus handling, dialogs, buttons, menus, text selections and developer tasks such as IDE, packaging and application startup.

Monday morning started with walking into our venue that looked somewhat like a classroom.

What we achieved

During the course of the week we achieved what we’d set out to do:

• Amended the theme palette to include any missing colours and then apply these to various components
• Completed the implementation and release the bottom edge component into the staging environment
• Completed the section scrolling prototype and have it reviewed by visual design and UX
• Completed the portrait and landscape edit mode header prototype
• Worked out behaviour of complex SDK components for focus handling and added some best practice examples to the specification
• Communicated and gained concensus on the context menu design, who are now gearing up for some pre-requisite work and then implementation of context menus
• Prepared the visual rules for buttons and made the Ubuntu shape ready to use for buttons
• Completed the design for sliders  
• Discussed a tree view component for navigation
• Created a first draft of tabs wireframes and functionality agreed
• Created a first draft of text selections visuals and reviewed, UX and functionality was discussed ready to include in the specification
• Created the Libertine packaging project and containers
• Tidied up the IDE
• Created some Snapp packages and got them working
• Ramped up some new  investigative work that arose in our collaboration

The planets aligned… literally

In the early hours of Wednesday morning  (before breakfast) a few of us managed to witnessed a planetary conjunction (Venus, Mars and Jupiter) which was truly amazing… a surprise benefit of sprinting in the arctic circle.

Even though there were a few hours of daylight, we managed to embrace the cold and stand outside to enjoy the beautiful views during lunch and coffee breaks.

All in all, it was a very productive and fun sprint. We left with a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie.