People expect the backlight colours on the unity launcher to mean something.
I've tested Unity on some innocent users. By that, I mean people who have little or no experience with Ubuntu or other distros and aren't coloured by politics or expectations from previous versions of Ubuntu. The two most common questions I get is 1) what does that blue point on the Ubuntu button mean and 2) what do the different colours in the launcher mean? Once I've explained that blue dot, they all say oh, ok and that's the end of it. It does require an explanation though, and I think that means it isn't obvious enough. The identifier showing which window is calling for attention, certainly is not obvious enough. But I had no answer to what the different background colours on the launcher meant. I had to investigate it. It seems that the background colour is chosen by the most dominant foreground colour of the icon. Firefox, Nautilus, Xchat and Ubuntu One all have orange as a dominant colour, so they get an orange background. Gcalctool, Gedit and Totem have grey as a dominant foreground colour, so they get a grey background. This doesn't seem like a good solution to me. People, including myself, expect the background colour to have some sort of meaning. Since I didn't have the answer myself, I thought it'd be interesting to see what people would guess those colours to mean. Most had no idea and had no basis to even make a guess, but I did get some replies from current users of Ubuntu. These are some of the answers I've received, from various people: * It depends on the vendor. Free software gets one colour and proprietary apps get another. * It depends on the toolkit. Gtk apps get one colour and Qt-apps a different colour. * It depends on category. Office applications get a grey background colour and communication applications are orange. * It depends on Ubuntu One. Synced apps are orange and non-synced are grey. I think these ideas are all interesting, mostly because absolutely no-one guessed the correct answer; that it's only aesthetics. It seems to me that this has to be reconsidered. I think I believe that the best solution is for all apps to have the same background colour when running and another when they're not running. Orange and grey seems to be fairly decent choices. I'm not sure about this. But I am completely convinced that the colours should either be the same for all apps or have a deducible meaning, Has this been discussed at the UDS? What are the current thoughts? Best regards, Jo-Erlend Schinstad -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
PiTiVi in Ubuntu 11.10 and beyond
Hello there, You may know me as one of the main contributors of the pitivi project. I do bug triaging, testing, community management, documentation writing, design, website maintenance, coding, etc. It has come to my attention that the desktop team has decided at UDS to remove Pitivi from the default selection of apps installed with Ubuntu. I would like to have a better understanding of what led to this decision, and hopefully revert it. As far as I can tell, there is no recording of the session other than a couple of notes on http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/desktop-o-default-apps/ , which I shall quote entirely below for the record: === quote === Nominations off the CD: * PiTiVi (video editing) - Apple doesn't have an editor (this should be a motivation to keep it, in fact) - We took off gimp because we don't need an editor for common cases - Still a bit crasfhy and not prime-time (2.5 stars in software-center) - package itself is 265kb - poorly maintained (hasn't migrated to gtkbuilder) - Sounds like we want it off then == end quote = Since we were left in the dark and notified only after the fact (through news sites and the session notes above), we've been wondering what has been going on. Can I get a better explanation than that? These points struck me as a bit unconvincing. But before I start, let me first say that we have a new release coming up by the end of the week. More details further below. We took off gimp because we don't need an editor for common cases You took off GIMP because, as I remember it, you considered that apps like Shotwell (F-Spot, back then) would be able to handle the basic photo correction needs of most users. Unless you're telling me that Ubuntu now aims to be a distro that only focuses on consuming culture instead of producing it? Video editing is becoming increasingly popular with the rise of video sharing sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and many people now take culture production into their own hands using dirt-cheap hardware (such as point-and-shoot photo cameras or cellphones capable of high-definition recording). Video is now part of the web, and video production should be part of Ubuntu. a bit crashy and not prime-time Could you be more precise? All applications have bugs. Bugs in video editors are particularly difficult to troubleshoot, even moreso when 9 users out of 10 reporting bugs in LP don't provide the requested information and the bug cannot be reproduced. FWIW, while it certainly isn't perfect, it is certainly good-enough for users to make videos such as http://www.pitivi.org/?go=showcase . Besides, the upcoming release is going to fix a ton of very annoying bugs, but more details on that further below. 2.5 stars in the software center You base your claim of poor user reception upon *ten* user ratings? When we have thousands of pitivi users? See also: https://www.ohloh.net/p/pitivi http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Praise Please consider: - Ten ratings is a ridiculously low number for statistical significance. - There are inherent sampling problems with a voluntary rating system like yours, where a vocal minority of dissatisfied users will go rate the app negatively while a silent majority of users are happy with the app and don't spend time writing reviews all over the place. Some more insight into how statistics can be misleading: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2010/10/17/video-editors-usage-statistics-duty-calls/ poorly maintained (hasn't migrated to gtkbuilder) Is that the only thing you base yourself upon to say that an application is poorly maintained? - First, there already is a development branch that tackles the gtkbuilder migration in pitivi. It's not finished yet, as pitivi is not a trivial application (and we had a big UI redesign in the past few months), those things take time and it was not our absolute first priority, but since there is an active contributor working on it, I can guarantee that it will be done by Ubuntu 11.10. - Secondly, there have been over 900 commits since last year. While we are not the fastest moving project around in the FOSS world, I trust that we are moving at a reasonable speed given our limited manpower and the difficulty of the task at hand. Whatsmore, - There are *four* students working on pitivi for this Summer of Code, hopefully tackling all the major projects/missing features that have been the traditional subject of criticism towards pitivi. I haven't had the time to blog about this yet because I was busy with studies, LGM, work, and preparing the release. - A new release maintainer has been appointed (which should help at releasing more often). Over the past few weeks, we have been furiously merging branches and patches, fixing bugs, and testing pitivi thoroughly to push out a new release out of the door in the coming days. The announcement to remove pitivi from Ubuntu's default selection came right in the middle of that. On that note, I am deeply
Re: PiTiVi in Ubuntu 11.10 and beyond
Hi Jeff, here is a link to a recording of the session, hope that helps http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-13-14-10-desktop-o-default-apps.ogg just used PiTiVi last night for the first time, it seemed pretty good to me. Alan. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: PiTiVi in Ubuntu 11.10 and beyond
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 14:26, Jeff Fortin nekoh...@gmail.com wrote: We took off gimp because we don't need an editor for common cases You took off GIMP because, as I remember it, you considered that apps like Shotwell (F-Spot, back then) would be able to handle the basic photo correction needs of most users. Unless you're telling me that Ubuntu now aims to be a distro that only focuses on consuming culture instead of producing it? Video editing is becoming increasingly popular with the rise of video sharing sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and many people now take culture production into their own hands using dirt-cheap hardware (such as point-and-shoot photo cameras or cellphones capable of high-definition recording). Video is now part of the web, and video production should be part of Ubuntu. Absolutely, until Totem can do basic editing, or Ubuntu ships with some other video player that does, how can PiTiVi be removed? a bit crashy and not prime-time Could you be more precise? All applications have bugs. Bugs in video editors are particularly difficult to troubleshoot, even moreso when 9 users out of 10 reporting bugs in LP don't provide the requested information and the bug cannot be reproduced. FWIW, while it certainly isn't perfect, it is certainly good-enough for users to make videos such as http://www.pitivi.org/?go=showcase . Besides, the upcoming release is going to fix a ton of very annoying bugs, but more details on that further below. This one almost was a good point, except that Unity is a bigger change, yet that was pushed even though it was much less stable, not to mention what Jeff brings up in poorly maintained 2.5 stars in the software center You base your claim of poor user reception upon *ten* user ratings? When we have thousands of pitivi users? See also: https://www.ohloh.net/p/pitivi http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Praise Please consider: - Ten ratings is a ridiculously low number for statistical significance. - There are inherent sampling problems with a voluntary rating system like yours, where a vocal minority of dissatisfied users will go rate the app negatively while a silent majority of users are happy with the app and don't spend time writing reviews all over the place. Some more insight into how statistics can be misleading: http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2010/10/17/video-editors-usage-statistics-duty-calls/ poorly maintained (hasn't migrated to gtkbuilder) Is that the only thing you base yourself upon to say that an application is poorly maintained? - First, there already is a development branch that tackles the gtkbuilder migration in pitivi. It's not finished yet, as pitivi is not a trivial application (and we had a big UI redesign in the past few months), those things take time and it was not our absolute first priority, but since there is an active contributor working on it, I can guarantee that it will be done by Ubuntu 11.10. - Secondly, there have been over 900 commits since last year. While we are not the fastest moving project around in the FOSS world, I trust that we are moving at a reasonable speed given our limited manpower and the difficulty of the task at hand. Whatsmore, - There are *four* students working on pitivi for this Summer of Code, hopefully tackling all the major projects/missing features that have been the traditional subject of criticism towards pitivi. I haven't had the time to blog about this yet because I was busy with studies, LGM, work, and preparing the release. - A new release maintainer has been appointed (which should help at releasing more often). Over the past few weeks, we have been furiously merging branches and patches, fixing bugs, and testing pitivi thoroughly to push out a new release out of the door in the coming days. The announcement to remove pitivi from Ubuntu's default selection came right in the middle of that. I've been playing with the prerelease, and it's great (congrats!). The only thing i don't understand is why all of these improvements were packed into one release-- seems like there are enough improvements for a few releases since the last one. I guess that's hardly a criticism, just that people have been dying for a new version and the progress being made wasn't obvious. On that note, I am deeply disappointed by the complete lack of contributions and support we had from Canonical and Ubuntu. Not only are we told that we are bad at maintaining our software, we are somehow expected to churn out perfect releases at a rapid pace (we are being considered unmaintained because we haven't managed to magically become the perfect video editor within *one* year of being included in Ubuntu?), and yet we have not seen any patches coming from @canonical or @ubuntu addresses (except one 1-liner patch that removes the version number from the title bar). Given that pitivi was in Main, I would have expected some sort of support from Canonical.
