Smaller Launcher with intellihide = nice.

Here’s my desktop when I’m working on stuff:

And here it is clean with my Launcher shrunk down, thanks to Andrea Azzarone’s contribution. This feels really great on my laptop:

Neil’s also landed a bunch of multimonitor fixes. Here’s some other goodies in Unity 3.6.4. Bitesize report on Tuesday, but I just had to share the love on this tiny-launcher.

I am now on the fence whether I should keep my bookmark toolbar or hide it to get even more content on my screen, but I do find it useful. 

Unity Bitesize Report for Alpha 3

(Original Post)

Lots of updates today. First of all, by the time you read this or by the time your mirror updates (or when you get Alpha 3 on Thursday) you’ll have the latest drop of the Unity Dash:

Unity File Places

Unity 11.04 DashSearching through the Dash in Ubuntu 11.04Quick lists land in Unity

Other Contributors this Week

  • We have a new contributor this week, Marco Bisaro has fixed  Bug #713789 – Upper left Ubuntu logo has different background color than panel.
  • Olivier Sauder’s work on keybindings for the launcher has landed
  • Mathew Rasmus has made it so the launcher uses proper getter/setter for the Launcher’s member-var_launcher_action_state.
  • This could be you! See below!

General Unity Fixes and New Stuff

What a crazy week! Double dose of unity (Thursday and Tuesday)! We also got a new compiz with a full stack rebuild/update. That totalize more than 23 updates within the week. As you can see, we got a lot of fixes and enhancements:
https://launchpad.net/unity/3.0/3.4.6
https://launchpad.net/unity/3.0/3.6

Other Highlights

  • Most of known common crashers for unity have been tackled
  • Lot of accessility improvments
  • Lot of launchers fix and most of “false show” positive or “launcher being crazy” on intellihide mode fixed
  • Drag and drop from the application and file places to the launcher is now functional (but still in beta Funny :) )
  • New shortcuts with the Super key:
    • tap super open the dash
    • Keeping super press will get some shortcuts showing: Super + to get active window of an application or show the places/ws switcher/trash
    • if you add Shift to the dance, it will open a new instance of an application instead of getting an existing one
    • Key navigation to all elements of the launcher now, and quicklist! Alt + F1 showing the launcher when hidden.
  • Rework fade effect animation when hovering the bfb (the ubuntu logo) Still some known crasher on the unity window decorator. It’s tracked and under debugging right now. Hope we can get a fix after alpha3 on upgrade.

How to Get Involved

1. Get the Code

Follow the Step by Step Instructions and Wiki Page. This will get the code from Launchpad, set up your development environment, and getting you used to the Launchpad workflow.

2. Pick a bug

This week we want to focus on these bugs, pick one:

  • Bug 718889 -  Launcher does not hide/unhide on Expo
  • Bug 660010 – No ‘safely remove’ option is present in the unity menu when a usb disk is inserted
  • Bug 718885 – Launcher responds to click off from a quicklist
  • Bug 721121 – Icon in Launcher should be home folder icon
  • Bug 718885 – (NEW!) Launcher responds to click off from a quicklist
  • Bug 725529 – (NEW!) Double-click on panel to unmaximize only works in right half
  • Bug 724727 – (NEW!) Super key shortcut overlay not with umlauts, greek/cyrillic letters
Here’s the full list if you want to find more, feel free to just grab one, assign it to yourself, mark it in progress and get started. I’ll be picking a new selection for each blog post each week, but the list is always changing, so you can always just dive into the list and snag one.

3. Fix your bug and then get your code into Unity

Don’t worry we won’t leave you hanging, you can get a-hold of a Unity developer through many different ways:

  • #ayatana on freenode IRC during European and American workdays. Or you can post to the mailing list if you have a question.
  • We also have weekly IRC Q+A for any developer who wants to dive in and ask a Unity developer. 7pm-8pm UTC (That’s 2pm EST) every Friday!
  • Mention session in developer week.

Now we can rock this…

Mikkel and Ken have a weekend present for you for those of you who have been waiting to add Unity Launcher bling to your Python apps. I guess these are bindings or “accessible in python” or whatever the GI way of saying it is:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/LauncherAPI

Please note that this is new and I’m really just trying to sucker you into banging on it so you can file bugs and update documentation.

(You might need gir1.2-unity-3.0 if you don’t have it installed)

Supporting LibreOffice

In case you missed it LibreOffice is taking donations:

To legally form The Document Foundation in Germany, a minimum of 50,000 Euros is needed. Therefore, we’ve launched this public 50,000 Euro challenge to raise the funds through donations.

Donate to LibreOffice

Chromify OSD now in the Chrome Web Store

From idea to …. now available.

Many thanks to Stuart Langridge for his initial prototype and to George Edison and Marco Ceppi for implementing it and submitting it through the web store process. 

Now to shake the bugs out and polish it up …

PSA: The Oatmeal is coming out with a book.

The Oatmeal is pretty funny.

Apparently he’s coming out with a book.

Preordered.

Progress Meters, quicklists, and number count for the Unity Launcher

Here’s something I’ve been waiting for that I’m sure application authors will enjoy: 

We now have an API for applications to leave a progress meter and/or a number on their launcher. The wiki page is a bit sparse so expect more detail there over the coming week.

What we need to do

Well, the first thing I’m working on is getting the wiki page up to shape. We’re going to need examples for different languages, and basically make the page useful for application developers. I’m on that this week. I could use a hand here if someone wants to dig in.

Next, we need people to think about where this is useful. So right away, you’re thinking mail apps, Transmission and Deluge, USC, update-manager, etc. 

The library is called libunity, which is the same library you’ll use for Places and stuff, and you can use it in one of two ways:

  •  Directly in your application, just link up to libunity, you’ll notice the the API is similar to app indicators. This is on purpose, so if you’ve already got libindicator support in your app, this should just be additive and straightforward.

For example, right now your application might put a “new message” counter in the messaging menu, this is designed so that you can also just plop the same number right on the launcher icon too.

  • Or standalone, like the example on the wiki page - this is for you people who want to write little wrapper scripts to monitor something (like say, your mutt instance on a remote server, *hint hint*) (think of the things we could get from byobu running on your server!)

Application developers, we’re looking for feedback for libunity, feel free to file bugs.

How You Can Help

Feel free to start filing bugs in Launchpad for applications to support this. Make sure you tag em “bitesize”, as these will be easy for people to dig into and make work.

Got a favorite application? Link the up to our resources or they can contact us directly if they want help with linking these up.

Other Unity Improvements that Just Landed

Part 2 of the things that landed today are much more user visible, mainly, drag and drop for the Launcher:

  • Drag stuff into the trash
  • Being able to drag files onto apps, for example select 4 text files and drag all of them onto the text editor and it will open them all up at once.
  • Drag any .desktop files right into the launcher, but you can’t drag from the Dash yet, but you will be able to soon. For an example of this drag and drop applications from /usr/share/applications to get an idea.
  • Drag anything from a GNOME menu, GNOME Panel, and any dock that does xdnd into the launcher (for those of you with frankendesktops) - remember that we already import those launchers on first run.

Random small bling

Because people only land cool stuff after my weekly report: 

First off, Marco Trevisan (Treviño) has readded the old autohide behavior to the launcher for those of you that are into that sort of thing. Here’s the video showing you how it works.

Secondly, power keyboard users might want to check out the keyboard shortcuts page. I recently discovered the power of Ctrl-Alt-numpad, I think you’ll dig it. 

And lastly, Jason’s made it so that when you drag a certain file type into the launcher the application that launches it stays lit, but the rest “shut off”. So assuming you have say, GIMP and Shotwell in your launcher dragging a .png close to the launcher will keep those lit and the ones that don’t support .png will not be lit. Small, but slick.

Unity Bitesize Report for 8 Feb

Welcome to another edition of the Unity bitesize report!

New Stuff

Cando’s been working on two fixes (which are under review). The first is being able to middle click on a maximized window title in the panel and have that be pushed to the background.

In case you didn’t know, you can middle click on window titlebars and they get pushed behind other windows. This can be a very handy window management technique, but now that we’ve welded the title bar with the top panel when a window is maximized this was missing. So thanks to Cando for preserving this bit of “UNIX Law that this feature must exist” on our desktops.

The second bit he’s working on is making it so that when you click on the Trash Can it only opens one window (or focuses it if you have it open but lost it) instead of opening a bunch of trash cans.

The Big List

Here’s the list of bitesize bugs that can be snagged and fixed by anyone who wants to get involved.

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

  • Chris Coulson has landed the application menu work in Thunderbird!
  • Mat Trudel is continuing his work on multimonitor support in Unity but is probably realizing that this wasn’t bitesize at all. Yum!
  • Jason’s landed the Launcher API bits, which will allow applications to interact with the launcher better. Things like new mail indicators with a little number, download progress for clients, etc. (More to follow on this in the future)
  • Mikkel’s been working on the Places API, so expect the wiki page to be updated this week. Once this lands we’ll finally be able to have people implementing some of the great ideas for Places we’ve been collecting. (I’ll have a seperate blogpost about this one later)
View Separately

Making a better apt.ubuntu.com (translators wanted)

One of the best resources we have (that people seemingly don’t use enough) is apt.ubuntu.com. 

In the beginning we tried doing apt:// links, but that required websites and programs supporting it, so now we have a URL that you can just give to a person like http://apt.ubuntu.com/p/banshee, they clicky, and it fires up the Software Center and prompts them to install it. 

Try it:

Install Banshee

This is way handier than telling people “apt-get install blah …”, easier to use, and very handy for tweeting, etc. Well, apt.ubuntu.com is ugly, and doesn’t work on Chrome, which is a bummer for me.

Well, Marco Ceppi has been working on this, check it out:

As it ends up, mpt has an entire specification on how this is going to work, so Marco implemented it, here’s a demo: http://apt.marcoceppi.com/

Marco’s ready to take this to the next level, but he needs translations. Luckily, the project is in Launchpad, so any help you can lend a hand would be appreciated: https://translations.launchpad.net/apturlredirector

(Oh, feel free to snag the code, submit branches, etc.)

Unity Shortcuts, let’s document them…

I’ve started this page.

If you’re running 11.04, please start adding shortcuts to this page as you find them. Or if you have the time to go through CCSM and add them all to this page it would be quite useful.

Unity Bitesize Bug Report for 1 Feb

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. 

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.

User Days: Unity Q+A and other sessions

Got nothing better to do this weekend?

Well, you could check out Ubuntu User Days. A full day of user-related tutorials this Friday and some sessions on Saturday night too weekend, depending on where you live.

At 0300UTC (10pm EST) on Saturday Jason Smith and I will be fielding Unity questions for an hour, followed by general “What’s cooking in Ubuntu”, where I’ll field questions on what we’ve been working on for the past few months.

So drop by on IRC and bring your questions!

Unity Bitesize Bug Report for 25 January

Welcome to another installment of the Unity Bitesize bug report. We’re a little over a week away from Alpha2. In case you missed it, Rick reports that the initial implementation of the Dash has landed.

Annoyances Fixed:

Sam’s taken care of 2 long-annoying bugs this week. The first is the “menus drawing behind menus”, and bug 705324, which was causing the flash plugin to crash in Chromium repeatedly. This week also saw the death of Bug 693073, which painted an invisible menus in your screen, leading to the impression that your application wasn’t clickable, since there were invisible menus painting over it. This one was so annoying that didrocks uploaded it right away, the other fixes you can expect on Thursday.

Here’s a list of bugs that are Fix Committed, that is fixed in Unity trunk but haven’t been uploaded yet. This is basically “what to expect this Thursday”.

The Hit List

The following bugs need a helping hand, feel free to dive in and fix em up!

Getting Involved

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.