Unity Bitesize Bug Report for 4 January

aka. Holiday Leftovers

Time for another Unity status report. As you can expect due to holidays around the world not much progress was made other than expanding our waistlines.

Expect a flurry of activity this week as Unity developers spin up for the new year. Next week the Unity team will be sprinting in Dallas, Texas along with other members of the Canonical Platform team so expect a bunch of updates.

New to Unity but not Ubuntu is Shane Fagan, who adds a unity —replace command. Hey, it’s all about the little things. Matthew Rasmus returns with 2 fixes (both committed in trunk but not yet released, expect it on Thursday/Friday):

  • 691765 - When a menu is triggered from Alt+key, app name stays visible on panel 
  • 691812 - Window border doesn’t get restored
  • Stefano Candori has made progress on getting quick lists connected up to the Trash Can. 
  • Mathieu Trudel’s been looking at fixing the top panel’s multimonitor awareness. 

The Big List

Lots of repeats here due to work stoppage, now is the time to jump in if you want a piece!

  • 684193 - compiz crashed with SIGSEGV in g_source_unref()
  • 683547 - Bottom launchers hard to expand with filled launcher bar, need edge scrolling
  • 687956 - should display the launcher tooltips after a delay
  • 687958 - should provide an IsUnityRunning() dbus method
  • 688816 - Don’t create windows over the panel
  • 689929 - Update managers Apply Settings window doesn’t trigger unity’s smarthide
  • 691114 - Quicklists for icons at the bottom of the screen are clipped by screen edge
  • 677594 - Workspace switcher useless with one workspace
  • 681428 - scrolling does not work on the sound menu
  • 686182 - Unity launchers run multiple copies of program if clicked multiple times before the program loads
  • 688537 - Launcher icon tooltip not following system font update
  • 689010 - wrong icon for “blank cd-r disc” in launcher
  • 692967 - First-run of Unity should scan AWN, Docky and other popular launcher settings
  • 600875 - No documentation for using/configuring Unity
  • 692444 - clicking trash multiple times opens multiple instances of it.
  • 693792 - Launcher icon goes behind launcher if dialog pops up while dragging icon

Here’s the full list.

Other Unity Work

  • Mathieu Trudel continues to work on the nm-applet port to application indicators. He’s now got wireless icons in the dropdown. (This is a screenshot of it from his laptop, so this is just a tease, nothing landing yet) 

  • Conor Curran has sent along an update on what’s going on with the sound indicator
  • Auto/intellihide is now on by default in trunk and intial support for using the Super key to invoke the launcher has also landed.
  • The launcher now supports scroll events (like your mouse wheel).

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.

Maximize is the new fullscreen

Here’s something I discovered yesterday as I was tooling around on my home server while using Unity. This is what happens when you maximize a terminal in Unity Alpha in Natty (Assuming you have autohide on, it’s not turned on by default yet but it will be, here’s how):

(Bigger pic)

If this was normal Ubuntu you’d have another panel AND the titlebar. This is all now fused into one out of the way thing, saving pixels and getting out of my way. 

I know what you’re thinking. Endless combinations of terminal tabs and/or Terminator splits and byobu. I might almost want to be a sysadmin. Here’s gedit:

(Bigger pic)

This is real useful when I’m working on something, I need my desktop to be out of the way. Obviously there’s a lot of work to be done in this area, but it’s coming together, stay tuned for a Unity progress report later today. 

Shotwell .8 is out.

The Yorba folks have released a new version of Shotwell. You can snag it here.

New features include:

  • Video support for Ogg, AVI, MP4, Quicktime, and WMV files
  • Upload videos to major Web services, including YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and PicasaWeb
  • Runtime monitoring of library directory
  • Background writing of metadata to master files
  • Flagging of photos for batch operations
  • Set multiple photos to desktop background slideshow

Congrats to the Yorba team!

Sound Indicator news and updates

The following is a guest blog by Conor Curran:

I joined Canonical early January 2010 to fill the role of Sound Architect on the DX team. Ever since I have been implementing a redesign of the system sound menu. ‘Indicator Sound’ is part of a core group of system indicators which sit on the top panel of the Ubuntu desktop. Its main purpose is to allow users to control the system’s sound settings (through pulseaudio). PulseAudio which is the sound server generally used on Linux systems ( similar to Apple’s CoreAudio or MS’s WASAPI ).

From Maverick onwards the inidicator was enhanced to allow for popular Media players to be controlled from the menu. This was made possible by the good work of the MPRIS people particularly Mirsal Ennaimem, Alex Merry, Ian Monroe and Lennart Poettering. I feel our immediate use-case really spurred the new version of this MPRIS into fruition. Currently Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, VLC, Xnoise, Media Player Daemon all support complete integration with the menu.


The Natty release uses exclusively the MPRIS2 protocol including the playlist extension. This will enable applications like Spotify (with the MPRIS extension) to integrate seamlessly into the menu as no extra dependency will be needed.



More information on client registration can be found in the spec. The launchpad home for the project is https://launchpad.net/indicator-sound and the source can be fetched from the development trunk at lp:indicator-sound (or alternatively you can grab a tarball of the most recent release).

I hangout on #ayatana, #ubuntu-desktop on #freenode under the alias of ‘ronoc’. Any questions please feel free to ping me any time or ask the developer mailing list.

On my roadmap amongst other indicator concerns will be a focus on the ubuntu user experience for the lightweight audio dabbler to the medium weight MP3 mixer. David Henningsson, Daniel Chen, Luke Yelavich and Rodrigo Moya have been doing great work around this area and as this is something very close to my heart I should really be more involved …

Getting the Ubuntu font working on your own website

Now that the Ubuntu font is available via the Google Font thing I took a few minutes to add it to my blog.

Here are the instructions, it’s just a few lines of HTML. You can find more information about using the font on the web here.

Thanks to Paul Sladen for the tip.

Helping out Compiz

In case you’ve missed out, smspillaz has started working fulltime at Canonical on working on Compiz. 

Sam’s been shuffling getting things fixed in the code and needs a bit of help, so I asked him to put together a list of things Compiz could use help with.

  • Finish writing the compiz code doxygen
  • Provide a support for sound events using libcanberra in gnomecompat
  • Package compiz-plugins-extra and compiz-plugins-unsupported
  • Figure out why evince is placing it’s window wrongly
  • Figure out what is up with gtk-window-decorator on virtualbox
  • Figure out what is up with resizing xterm in one direction

Here’s the full list with details, if more issues come up we’ll add them there.

Also a special thanks to the moderators of the Ubuntu Forums who volunteered to help the Compiz forums clean out some spam and tidy things up a bit. High five!

Tag `em and bag `em

Filing and fixing your own bitesize bugs = recommended and encouraged!

Unity Bitesize Progress Report for 20 December

It’s time for another Unity bitesize bug report. First off let’s welcome another new contributor:

Stefano Candori, aka Cando. He’s worked on other projects, like the GNOME Activity Journal, Emesene and Emesene 2.

Cando has fixed: 

Bug 683466 - There are 2 Quit menu options in Quicklist

Which was the annoying thing where applications that generated menus like Tomboy had had two two Quit Quit entries entries. See? I told you it was annoying. He’s currently checking out adding quick lists to the Trash Can. Unless of course you are from England, in which case the correct term is Rubbish Bin.

Here’s the interesting ones for the week. Feel free to grab any of these bugs and start hacking.

Here’s the full list.

Other Unity News

Reports are coming in about double window widgets and titles, don’t worry, it’s just a transition while we debug the widgets in the top panel (this is mostly fixed in trunk, expect a proper fix end of this week):

This week also includes fixes from Neil Patel and Jason Smith, with some other fixes from Michael Terry (a unity icon and a category in ccsm), along with the return of launcher drag and drop of icons. (Check out the picture)

The team would also like to send a thanks to Omar Akram and Hernando Torque for their ever vigilant bug work and testing.

Jason Smith ran a Unity Ask Me Anything on reddit if you’re interested in some of the gory details of what it’s like to work on Unity. You can also find more information on Unity from the developers by following the Unity tag on Ask Ubuntu.

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.

Pithos and Pianobar, for the win.

Lifehacker had an article on pianobar, a command line client for Pandora. I found it nicer to use than the web Flash player, but I just had to have my Last.fm scrobbling.

DoR answered my question on how to set up pianobar to scrobble to last.fm. Not quite user-friendly, but hey, it’s a command line pandora client, you’re not going to give up when you run into CPAN are you?

Matthew however, pointed out Pithos, a GTK client for Pandora with built in last.fm scrobbling. I head-desked myself for not knowing about this app sooner.

There’s a bug report for MPRIS/SoundMenu support, I’ve mailed the author to see if there’s a way we can help. In the meantime, rock out to the AC/DC. 

Application Menu making it’s way to Firefox

Chris Coulson has been working on adding Application Menu support to Firefox for 11.04. Here’s the initial cut:

The reason you still see the old menu inside the window is that for testing developers will have both running so they can compare them side to side.

You can find the code to the extension here: https://launchpad.net/globalmenu-extension

Hackers and testers are welcome, but please remember that this is very young, so don’t expect ponies and unicorns.