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)

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)

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.

Other ways to integrate with web apps

Whilst we wait for chromify-osd to go through the Chrome App web store process I thought I’d point out some other ways where we could integrate Unity with the web. Here’s what my current New tab looks like in Chrome:

There are applications I’ve installed. And yeah, Jason Odoom has made a Launchpad application in the Chrome Web Store. Cool huh? 

However it doesn’t make sense to me that I have applications in my browser, it’s kind of too … bookmarkesque. Too many of these “html5 apps” are just fancy bookmarks. Here’s what I really want:

When I bookmark a web app, I want it in my launcher. (Or whatever your OS provides). And then when I click it, I want a full blown application:

Note how the Seesmic shortcut launches the web app in Chrome application mode. Clicking on those links spawn another browser process, no weird new tabs interfering with the web app. It behaves like a totally separate application.

This is just a sandboxed version of seesmic.com/app. No adobe air, no dealing with pesky OS installation garbage, just my application. That’s all I want.

Unity Bitesize Bug Status for 19 January

I’m a day late due to being sick yesterday, now things are back on track. 

The team is now back from Dallas, Texas, and as OMG!Ubuntu! points out, much has landed after the sprint, a culmination of a week’s work of hacking. Neil talks about Unity in this interview. Nice work Joey and Benjamin for covering Unity updates whilst the team flew back home. 

Other Bits

  • A ton of updates to the indicator stack, mostly renaming a bunch of methods. Not complicated, but the equivalent of a 31,577 line diff had to be merged, the bulk of this work was done by Mike Terry, Ken Van Dine and Ted Gould.
  • Unity 2D has landed, thanks to the intense work of the Ubuntu ARM team to get this packaged and available despite the huge amount of work, great job guys!
  • Resizing windows will finally work! So instead of a 1 pixel target you now have the entire shaded area to resize the window. The theme needs to be updated by the design team, so not totally fixed yet, but … hallelujah!

Upcoming this week

  • Sam assures us that he’s finally been able to fix the menu problem (drawing BEHIND the desktop and generally just being the worst bug lately)
  • Cross your fingers for Dash/Places (yep, we know we said we’d land it last week)

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.

Firefox application menu coming along….

Chris Coulson has the Firefox application menu extension working and in PPA for Natty testers:

Instructions here.

Please note, this is fast moving, so if your going to blog or retweet it please link to those instructions as I will be updating it over the course of the next few weeks.

Blur in Unity

Mirco Müller and Jay Taoko have just landed a Gaussian blur for quicklists in Unity trunk. It uses the OpenGL GLSL shading language on Nvidia. Intel and AMD/ATI will be implemented over the next coming weeks.

(AMD and Intel are currently using ARBprograms - later on if the hardware supports it they will also use OpenGL GLSL shading language)

 Expect this to land in Natty tomorrow.

Unity Bitesize Bug Report for 11 January

Welcome to the Unity report! Greetings from Dallas, Texas, where the the Ubuntu Platform team is gathered to get work finished for Natty.

The Unity team would like to say hello! This week the team would like to welcome Connor Carney to the team:

I’m a biochemist and part-time programmer who has been been using Ubuntu since Jaunty. I decided to contribute because I’m impressed to see real innovation on the desktop in Unity, and I wanted to help that effort. That, and the sound menu bug was *really* bothering me…

Connor busted out Bug 681428 - scrolling does not work on the sound menu — which was an annoting regression introducted with the port to Compiz. Now that that’s sorted the Sound Menu can really come together.

Shout out to Bertrand Lorentz, who has been tirelessly fixing integration details with Conor Curran in upstream Banshee. Mike Terry has fixed quick lists showing up as transparent.

Expect a bunch of things landing in trunk this week and a Unity release on Thursday into Natty.

The Hit List

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.

Integrating with web apps

Call for Help and Ideas!

Everyone knows I love web apps. You have two extremes. Old school “native apps and in control of my data” and then the other which is basically ChromeOS; No local state, all web. Most people are in the middle. You might love Gmail but the thought of having a remote word processor might not work for you.

I want my cake and I want to eat it too. I want web apps integrated with my desktop, which is why I am a big fan of site specific browsers. Recently these have been popularized by Chrome applications in the Chrome App Store — which is just a pretty front-end to what Stuart and I have been yelling about for 3 years.

When people do it right  (like Seesmic and Tweetdeck), it’s a great user experience. When people do it wrong, it’s just a stupid bookmark with no window chrome, meh. However, we can do little things to make it great. 

One area where we can integrate is notifications. Chrome/Webkit has notifications, they look like this: 

These are becoming more popular; Seesmic, Stack Overflow Chat, and irccloud to name a few. Well, why stop there? I asked Aq to hook up a prototype and then Marco Cepppi finished it.

Let’s chromify-osd:

A little bit of glue makes all the difference. To try it:

bzr branch lp:chromify-osd

cd chromify-osd

python chrome_notifyosd_server.py

Now, load the extension in Chrome. Wrench -> Tools -> Extensions, click on the developer mode link, and then choose Load unpacked extension and select the directory “chromify-osd”. Then use a webapp that uses extensions. Here’s an example one.

Aq passes along “Although remember that the best solution will still be to write a proper Chrome extension which intercepts notifications and uses D-Bus! An NPAPI extension. This is a hack.”

So what do we need? We need someone who can make a Chromium extension to connect web notifications to libnotify. I suspect that a proper extension will have to deal with sandboxing and a bunch of stuff Aq glazed over in order to give me hope that this is possible.

What else do we need? Well, we need Unity to decide to be the glue for the web. We can do this by connecting desktop services to the browsers. Wherever web app developers take this we need to connect it up for people. Here is the start of some plans Unity developers have for making this integration better.

Any takers on getting this started?

Where else can we do this? How about we make it so when people make the App Shortcut we “install it” for them?

Now we’re talking! I also what a nice high resolution icon on the launcher with little numbers for new emails, etc. fta pointed out the code where Chromium does the shortcut thing, maybe someone can take a crack at it once the Launcher gets closer to being finished.

(My examples use Chrome since it ships app shortcuts out of the box, the same should apply for Firefox/Prism)

Whether you agree with web apps or not isn’t the point. Some people like them and some people don’t, either way your desktop should give you the best possible experience if you use Evolution or Gmail or whatever. Thoughts?