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. 

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.

Unity Status Report for 14 December

Another week, another set of bitesize bugs! But first off we’d like to welcome Matthew Rasmus to the growing list of new Unity Contributors. Matthew has been working on Bug 686182: “Unity launchers run multiple copies of program if clicked multiple times before the program loads”

I’ve been wanting to contribute to Ubuntu in some way ever since I started using it a year and a half ago, and I finally decided to start doing something about that with Unity. I’m a full time college student working on my major in computer science, and in my spare time I find myself playing playing guitar, or piano, or video games. 

This week also sees Jamal Fanaian returning for a nice autohide fix. Here’s some goodies for this week:

Here’s the full 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.

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. 

A nice autohide fix for the Unity launcher

Jason Smith sends this along:

So there was a seemingly simple bug, the launcher would autohide when the quicklist was open.This was due to the fact that the launcher was entirely unaware of when a quicklist was open.



So I layed out a design to follow in the bug report, essentially I left a stubbed class that someone could implement.

As it ends up Jamal Fanaian has returned for his 2nd straight day of Unity contributions. Jason continues:

The class he created tracks the state of all quicklists in the launcher, then informs the launcher when they show/hide/change. He then made the launcher consume this information and avoid hiding when one was showing. Oh, and he cleaned up a bunch of code while he was doing it, just for giggles.

Not a bad start!

Unity Coding Style Guide

Just in case people aren’t aware here’s the coding style guide, freshly updated with C++ bits.

Getting Started working on Unity

Now that Alpha 1 is out the door the different bits are starting to come together. We’ve got the compiz-based Unity in people’s hands, now it’s time to start the feature work and testing.

The Desktop Experience team is building the base; but there are plenty of other parts that need to be done. Keep in mind that these parts are just as important and a critical piece of the entire user experience.

(Scott Mitchell)

When you pick up a Fender Geddy Lee Jazz Bass everything is as It Should Be(tm). The attention to detail is evident in every part of the bass. No one wants a cool looking instrument that sounds like slop, and no one wants an instrument that sounds amazing but can’t stay in tune. The person who does the seemingly unimportant part of polishing the neck takes their job as seriously as the person choosing the wood, or the person wiring the pickups. When you add all that up you get something magical. So what does this have to do with Ubuntu?

For developers we’re kicking off a Bitesize Bug campaign. Over the next few months we will be specifically finding small, easy to digest bugs that are just as important to the experience as the person doing the plumbing. This list will continue to grow and will contain not only fixes, but feature work as well, now’s the time to get involved if you want to get involved. Here’s a sample of some of the type of bugs we’re looking at:

So how can people fix these?

  1. Run Natty. You can either do this by running Alpha 1 on your bare metal or creating a USB key for this purpose. I’ve added documentation to that page so you can install a development environment on it so you can hack on code and keep the entire updated Unity environment on the key itself.
  2. Pick a bug from the list.
  3. Follow these instructions.
  4. Your work will be reviewed by someone on the DX team, after they review your code they will instruction you on what to do next.
  5. Celebrate!
  6. Go to step 1.

Expect regular weekly progress reports from me on the rock star craftspeople working on these bugs. The list of bugs will continually be updated, and now that Alpha 1 is out the door expect a nice steady stream of bitesize bugs that people can contribute fixes to.

Need help? Find us on #ayatana on Freenode, or the ayatana-dev mailing list.

QA tracking for Unity

Thanks to the hard work of Brian Murray we now have a section for Unity on http://status.qa.ubuntu.com

And here it is for the package level:

You’ll notice the “bitesize” section, more on this next week 

Unity Status update

Neil Patel has posted a status update of how Unity is coming along; for those of you chomping at the bit for compiz-powered goodness.