Devel

Time for a Quickly reboot?

Quickly is the recommended tool for opportunistic developers on ubuntu. When we created it 3 years ago, we made some opinionated choices, which is the essence of the project. We had back then a lot of good press coverage and feedbacks (Linux Weekly News, arstechnica, Zdnet, Maximum PC review, Shot of jak and some more I can’t find on top of my head…) Some choices were good, some were wrong and we adapted to the emerging needs that happened along the road.

Quickly: a path forward?

Seeing the amount of interests we saw around Quickly the past last years was really awesome! Now that we have some more detailed view on how people are using the tool, it’s time to collect and think about those data to see how we can improve Quickly. With all the new tools available like hangouts on air, it can be also now time to experiment how we can use them and use this opportunity to have a very open collaboration process as well as trying to attract more people to contribute to it.

Added rhythmbox radio support to unity music lens

Just got it merged (and will be freshly available in Unity 6.0 coming soon in quantal)! I spent few hours last week to add rhythmbox radios (and writing unit tests) for the music lens. It's been a long time I didn't write some serious vala (I guess last time was for unity's Alt+F2). I confirm it's still not my favorite langage ;) Coming back to the radios, they will now show as the last row (after tracks, albums and eventually online purchase ones), and they respect (if the metadata are provided in rhythmbox) to every usual music lens filters.

Some unity configuration in gnome-control-center.

Just finished some hacking for implementing some unity configuration options that are blessed by the design team, as shown in this official specification. It contains as well other ui tweaks. You can notice in particular the "Restore defaults" options that work on each tabs and restore every page's defaults. Those options are impacting both unity and unity-2d. This gave particular challenges as their features don't align (for instance, we don't show the "

Nautilus precise unity quicklist gets bookmarks!

Flying back from Budapest, I hacked on a long-time awaited design whishlist: "Nautilus quicklist does not contain the locations previously found under the 'Places' menu.". This is about getting the Unity quicklist for the nautilus launcher icon to display the list of the user's bookmark. It was unexpecdictly more "fun" that what I thought it would be. Indeed, there is already one dynamic quicklist, appearing when you are making a copy operation which can take some time (when the copy dialog appears), giving the possibility to "

OneConf in Oneiric and the way forward…

A little bit of retrospective OneConf is a pet project I'm trying to push since UDS Barcelona. The full idea is originally described on this wiki page: OneConf is a mechanism for recording software information in Ubuntu One, and synchronizing with other computers as needed. In Maverick, the list of installed software is stored. This may eventually expand to include some application settings and application state. Other tools like Stipple can provide more advanced settings/control.