I know I just recently posted about how awesome working in the OEM Services department was, but in the eternal quest for new challenges, I’ve moved over to the Desktop team at Canonical.
But before I get to that, one quick bonus story about a patch that I wrote in OEM Services that I really like. You know how when you plug in headphones with a standard audio jack that the audio immediately switches to headphones only? Nice feature right? Now plug in your USB headset. You’ll notice that it didn’t play through the headset: you have to go to the sound preferences tab and choose it as your output device, which is not intuitive. Same deal with bluetooth headsets.
From the user’s perspective, they should all work the same. They’re all just headsets. So for an OEM project, I wrote a pulseaudio module that tried to do just that: whenever a new pulseaudio sink or source became connected, it would switch to using it. It may need some polish (I’m no pulseaudio maintainer), but it works fine. I’d love to see it applied upstream.
Anyway, so I’m switching to the Desktop team to help work on Quickly and other application developer goodness. Speaking of which if you’re a developer, I have a session tomorrow all about release management as part of the App Developer Week: What’s the deal with time based vs feature based releases? How do I best use these Series and Milestone things in Launchpad? Find out tomorrow in #ubuntu-classroom at 14:00 UTC!