Time for more weekly bite-sized goodies!

New Contributors

This week the team welcomes Andrea Azzarone, who has merged in the ability to resize the Unity Launcher. (I’m digging it at 32px).

Andrea writes in “I am a 19 year old Italian student. I live in Monte Sant’Angelo and attending my last year of high school. I’ve used Ubuntu since 6.06 and simply love it. Honestly I did not expect all this to happen!”

Andrea is joined by other past contributors this week:

  • Jamie Rowe fixes Bug #717250: Dragging .desktop file to launcher’s trash creates space for new launcher icon
  • Marco Biscaro fixes Bug #731533: quicklist must respect enabled state, and “Empty trash quicklist item is missing an ellipsis” (LP: #731472) and “[launcher] Show disabled ‘Empty trash’ option when trash is already empty “(LP: #723880)

Three new contributors have also submitted fixes this week (but these haven’t been reviewed yet:)

  • Nico van Der Walt is investigating making ampersands work in quicklists.
  • Friik’s fixing making the Dash get unstuck from certain updates.
  • and finally Tom Jaeger’s submitted a fix so that clicking on the top panel will bring the maximized application forward.

Other Unity Updates

  • Back to normal business: whole unity release this Thursday (unity-place-files, unity-place-applications, libzeitgeist, libunity, nux, unity)
  • Full story as aways, available at https://launchpad.net/unity/+milestone/3.6.4

Some highlights:

  • Alt + F2 is back \o/ You can have some additional candies like path browsing in it, non-in-path executable and desktop file (icon) matching Still some work to do to support ~ and “launch in terminal”, but the main pieces are there.
  • Dash with keyboard navigation. There are some known issues (like enter doesn’t really trigger the fist item element), but that will be fixed next week.
  • We got back the place activation, meaning that now you have the “available items” like in maverick to be able to launch software-center on a non installed application
  • Lots of bug fixes as usual. A huge thanks to all our volunteer community contributor for all the fixes they are committing. The number is tremendously growing and it’s almost hard for us to keep up on merge requests!
  • We will try to bring back broken daily builds right now so that people can enjoy latest and live on the edge again!
  • Zeitgeist 0.7 will be synced this week
  • Incoming compiz fixes, especially for decorator crashes.

You can keep up on the FFe requests there: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/NattyReleaseStatus (This is a handy page to bookmark)

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 703067 – 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 –  Bottom icon on launcher tilts when it maybe shouldn’t if icons fill launcher nearly exactly
  • Bug 718889 – Launcher does not hide/unhide on Expo
  • Bug 693792 – Launcher icon goes behind launcher if dialog pops up while dragging icon
  • Bug 715185 – Non-removable volume doesn’t show up in Unity dock after mount.
  • Bug 727920 – Drag and drop auto-scroll should not fold the launcher at the end of the scroll range.
  • Bug 730273 – Search cursor in Unity’s Dash, File Places and Application Places search field should blink on focus
  • Bug 731162 – 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!

Remember you can read all of Jorge’s previous Bitesize Bug Reports™ by following the Bitesize tag.