A new week, a new contributor! This week the team would like to welcome Marco Trevisan (Treviño) to the team.
Marco has two feature improvements to the Unity desktop this week. The first is the notification when you mouse scroll to adjust the volume on the panel. This was covered by OMG!Ubuntu, which has a video if you want to see it in action. More importantly, Marco’s added scroll event support for the entire panel service.
…with Unity coming I consider it as a great chance for improving Ubuntu, making it something of really different that can be freely developed without being too much dependent from other platforms/projects; I’m always interested in knowing new platforms and to improve them (especially where they lack of something I’d need in my user-experience) so I firstly fixed some bugs in gwibber, plugins for synapse, adding markup support to improve indicator-datetime and indicator-sound (with the notify-osd patch).
The rest of Marco’s bio is here if you wanna check it out.
This week also marks the return of Stefano Candori, who has fixed Bug 688407, which was connecting the Trash can in the launcher to quick lists. (You’ll be able to now right click on the trash can in the launcher and empty it, etc.)
In hindsight the trash can bug was more of a full course meal with dessert than “bitesize”, so it took a while to sort it, so kudos to Cando for his tenacity.
The Big List
We’ve got some good turnover on bugs this week, so a good portion of these are fresh. This list marks the debut of Dash bitesizers and some requests for a little bling, mainly fade effects for the menu bar and window title.
I did a full podcast interview with Amber Graner if you want to listen in on how to get started with fixing these bitesize bugs.
- 675862 - Top panel isn’t multimonitor aware.
- 651398 - [dash] scrollbar’s clickable zone should extend to the right border of the dash border
- 687956 - should display the launcher tooltips after a delay
- 688816 - Don’t create windows over the launcher
- 688830 - Select quicklist items with just one right click
- 691776 - Fade effect when showing the menu bar
- 692444 - clicking trash multiple times opens multiple instances of it.
- 701569 - dash - search string not always taken into account
- 677594 - Workspace switcher useless with one workspace
- 686182 - Unity launchers run multiple copies of program if clicked multiple times before the program loads
- 688407 -
Trashcan needs quick listsCando ftw. - 689010 - wrong icon for “blank cd-r disc” in launcher
- 600875 - No documentation for using/configuring Unity
- 694924 - Window title could use a little fade
- 693792 - Launcher icon goes behind launcher if dialog pops up while dragging icon
- 703411 - Middle clicking top panel should push maximized window to background
Here’s the full list.
Getting Involved
Want to tackle some of these? Instructions for getting started are available here.
For more information check out the wiki page:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/Bitesize
If you have any questions feel free to pop by on #ayatana on Freenode.
Other Unity Tidbits
Two unity releases since last Tuesday! The alpha2 candidates brought good things (lot of bug fixes mainly) and bad as well (like freezes when you got the places installed). The full list is available here.
- This release contains the first real Places implementation. Be warned, it’s a real first sketchup of it, quite unstable and not optimized at all. It has some bugs.
- In addition to that, a lot of compiz uploads have been processed this week with a tremendous ABI break to handle, fixing finally the decoration sometimes disappearing, bringing other fixes to long standing bugs like the gnome-panel applets crashing, the menu stacking issue,
- Some defaults were changed to avoid overlap of the launcher - Everyone needs to do a unity —reset!
- The price for all this progress is a new bug where your mouse is grabbed and you can’t interact with anything with it anymore. Investigating it is the top priority after Alpha 2. From what we know, some window appears but is not mapped by compiz. Any info users can provide in that bug would be appreciated. This issue will be mentioned in the Alpha 2 release notes.
- There seems to be some issue with LibreOffice as well & unity. Not reproducible for everyone though (unity freezes on the viewport you have LibreOffice opened, decoration doesn’t work, dnd as well…). Needs clarification and more investigation.