This is the first guest post from Jorge O. Castro, External Developer Relations Liaison, who will be posting Unity updates over the coming weeks

Welcome to the Unity bitesize extravaganza. First off, if you’re interested in past progress reports I have them on my blog. However the folks at OMG! Ubuntu! decided that it might be “ace” for me to just tell you guys directly, so here we go.

First off, why are we doing this? Well as it turns out, while we have many awesome people working on Unity, things come together much better when we come together as a community. For a bit of background information on this, check out Jono’s post from yesterday. At its very core Ubuntu is a sum of all of our efforts, so we’ve been taking the time to identify places where you can put your brick in the wall. So the Unity development team been finding cool bugs that are a good place to get started so you can dip your toes in. We call these Bitesize Bugs.

This week the team welcomes Ruben Verweij, who sends along: “I’m an 18 year old physics/astronomy under-graduate from Holland who likes programming and making web sites. I have been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 2007…

… This is actually the first bug I fixed in anything, because Unity’s very comprehensible and Launchpad just rocks for managing code branches and merges!”

Ruben’s fixing Bug 677594, “Workspace switcher useless with one workspace”, instead if you have one workspace the switcher won’t show.

Joining Ruben this week are more keyboard shortcut fixes from Mathew Rasmus,

  • Exits keyboard navigation for the launcher when focus leaves (fixes 713632).
  • Exits launcher keyboard navigation when a launcher icon is dragged (fixes 713642).

And Marco Trevisan has made window titles fade when they run into your indicators instead of just chopping off, a small but classy improvement:

As you can see these kind of bugs are neither papercuts nor huge gaping chunks of functionality. They’re digestible tidbits that any one with knowledge of C++ can contribute to.

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 688816 – Don’t create windows over the launcher
  • Bug 718880 – Trash right click menu is positioned incorrectly.
  • Bug 718886 – Maximized windows do not always undecorate properly on initial map
  • Bug 718889 –  Launcher does not hide/unhide on Expo
  • Bug 660010 – No ‘safely remove’ option is present in the unity menu when a usb disk is inserted
  • Bug 651398 – [dash] scrollbar’s clickable zone should extend to the right border of the dash border
  • Bug 718185 – Dodge active window – launcher should not show when model dialog is opened
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!
  • Mention session in developer week.