M-L1NuX: Unity Bitesize Progress Report for 8 March

Welcome to the next instalment of the Unity Report. Lots of fixes since Alpha 3, and we have 2 releases this week, as the release of Alpha 3 froze the archive so the team decided to do a drop on Monday (and one more coming this Thursday, as usual).

The team is transitioning to more of a bug fixing mode, and now is the chance to dive in as we polish up Unity over the next 2 months.

You’ll notice a bunch of NEW! bugs in this week’s list. That’s because people are stepping up and grabbing bugs and working on them, so our rate of fixing bitesizers is increasing as people like you contribute!

New Contributors:

We’ve got two new Unity contributors this week, the team would like to welcome Artem Popov and Oliver Sauder:

Artem Popov has fixed Bug 730638 so now Unity gives user feedback when un-mounting a USB device. A man of not so many words, Artem adds “I am an Ubuntu member from Russia who has recently started contributing to Unity.”

Next up is Olivier Sauder :

Oliver’s fixed Bug 725529: “Double-click on panel to unmaximize only works in right half” as well as general keyboard navigation fixes. He adds: -

“I’m a full time programmer. However, in my spare time I always try to get my hands on various open source projects. As an enthusiast of real user experience I am excited what great innovation has been done in this area with Unity. This is one reason I have started to dig into its code base… ”

Back for More

Marco Bisaro returns, adding a “Safely remove” option when a USB stick is inserted, and making sure that the panel uses the “start-here” icon from your theme instead of it being hardcoded, and Places accidentally looking in the wrong location. (That’s 3 fixes in one week!)
Andrea Azzarone’s variable launcher size branch has landed, but it’s so fresh it’s not yet built and we don’t even have a picture of this masked hero at this time! (More on this next week!)
Lots of work going on in branches on Launchpad if you want to follow in-progress work being done by contributors.

Here’s the Unity section of the desktop team report:

New unity release on Monday!
- “What, on Monday? yeah Monday!”. As we skipped the release on Thursday for alpha3 (we had a bug fix released on previous Tuesday morning), we decided to do our next new shiny release yesterday! And it paid off, a lot of bug fixing in this one:
- The most annoying unity-window-decoration crash were fixed (but some are still there)
- Some unity crashes are part of the past as well (and same for the migration script)
- A huge speed improvement to the places
- Some minor “-” search fixes
- A lot of launcher behaviour autohide improvements. Seems though that it still likes to play the “I’m here even though I shouldn’t be haha Joey nya nya” game. Next release will add some debugging code for those wanting to hunt down those false positives!
Upload was concerning compiz/dee/libunity/unity-place-files/unity-place-applications… and of course, unity! Back to business with a usual release on Thursday (but the Launchpad rollout will probably force us to do the release a little bit earlier)

As usual, for the full story head to launchpad.net/unity/3.0/3.6.2

The team is mostly switching on a bugfix mode. Didier computed a list of most annoying compiz/nux/unity issues and they are tagged as top priority. So, we can hope to get most of them fixed very soon.
There is still a pending new dialog refactoring in compiz, it will require a FFe if it goes in. Nothing clear yet.
Also, a new zeitgeist synced from Debian will probably be needed. Kamstrup is doing a review to put some proper number on speed improvements to see if it is worth the FFe.

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 728598 – (NEW!) Dragging a file to the bottom left corner should send it to the trash
Bug 730623 – (NEW!) dash home screen can become outdated
Bug 703067 – (NEW!) Running/active indicators point to space between launcher icons for folded icons
Bug 724747 – Super key shortcut overlay not working with umlauts, greek/cyrillic letters
Bug 728949 – (NEW!) Bottom icon on launcher tilts when it maybe shouldn’t if icons fill launcher nearly exactly
Bug 718889 – (NEW!)Launcher does not hide/unhide on Expo
Bug 693792 – (NEW!)Launcher icon goes behind launcher if dialog pops up while dragging icon
Bug 715185 – (NEW!)Non-removable volume doesn’t show up in Unity dock after mount.
Bug 727920 – (NEW!)Drag and drop auto-scroll should not fold the launcher at the end of the scroll range.
Bug 730273 – (NEW!)Search cursor in Unity's Dash, File Places and Application Places search field should blink on focus
Bug 731162 – (NEW!)Dash “Find XYZ” require additional steps but do not end with “…” ellipse

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!