new user creation module in firstboot

[Matthias Clasen]

On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 15:34 -0400, Ben Konrath wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm working on a new user creation module for the new and improved
> firstboot. I created a little video to give people an idea of the UI
> interaction:
> 
> http://bagu.org/scratch/createuser.ogv
> 
> One open issue that I have is that I'd like to require that a user
> account be created by greying out the 'next' button until the
> information requested is complete and correct. 
> 
> If requiring a user account be created is not the best approach, what is
> the best way to allow the user skip this step? An initial idea I had was
> to grey out the 'next' button only when the user starts to enter
> information. The problem with this approach is that it's not easy for a
> user to cancel out of the account creation if they start the process but
> decide halfway through that they don't want a user account anymore. Any
> thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

If we don't want to make the user creation mandatory, then it is
probably best to not make the button insensitive at all. Instead, we
can pop up a message telling the user why creating an account is a good
idea when he tries to just click through. 

If he clicks the next button while the entered data is inconsistent or
incomplete, we can pop up a warning telling him that the entered data
does not allow to create an account.

> I've also been looking into using cheese to allow users to take a
> snapshot of their face with a webcam when they are creating their
> account in firstboot. The stock_person button in the video posted above
> would activate a dialog for this. I sent a message to cheese-list and
> one of the developers suggested that a dbus interface might work for
> this task. 

Not sure how dbus would come into this. I'd suggest to investigate a)
just launching cheese with some argument that tells it to take a single
snapshot and where to save it or b) just steal the relevant code from
cheese and embed the video directly in the user dialog.


Anyway, cool stuff.


Matthias