Contributor BadChoice

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

[....]

The emblems on icons give hints to the user about files and folders, however these mainly have to be added manually. Examples of more dynamic emblems are the read-only and symbolic link emblems.

I propose that more icon emblems be made which are dynamically allocated. These could even be animated and programmatically updated. Emblems could indicate things like:

* this file is being downloaded (with progress bar)
* this file has an unsaved version open
* this file is being accessed by another user
* this device is unsafe to remove
* this device is safe to remove
* a device's free space (as a progress bar)
* this version controlled folder can be updated
and so on

Applications could even add and update emblems on their own icons. For example:

* email programs could show an unread message count
* news programs could show an unread story count
* messaging programs could show a status icon
* messaging programs could show an unread message counter
* networked applications could show when they're disconnected
* editing programs could show if there are documents to be recovered
* downloading/transferring programs (like BitTorrent) could show a progress bar (or bars)

I would not go as far as allowing interactive elements (like play/next/etc. buttons on a music player) since these would interfere with the icon's main function, plus such things are more like full-blown applets/widgets/screenlets.

A nice benefit of this approach would be the ability to display a large amount of information completely in context (ie. only the information relevant to the displayed icons will be shown)

[....]

Apple's PowerPoint Presentation application, Keynote, is amazing & even better than PowerPoint, in some ways, notably, the slide transition effects & animations.

Most people do NOT know that PowerPoint supposedly was originally created for Macs, not PCs. The original company got bought out by guess who? Microsoft, of course.

Apple has since then created their own "PowerPoint" application called Keynote. Its a part of the iWork 08 application suite. I

Just watch any keynote presentation (on Apple.com or YouTube) given by Steve Jobs, i.e. the recent 3G iphone keynote announcement & introduction.

All linux users, not just Ubuntu users, need to have a PowerPoint or Keynote-like application that is equally professional & awesome in slide transitions & animations equal to the Desktop Effects found in Compiz-Fusion. Maybe it should be some how incorporated in w/the Compiz-Fusion Technology.

OpenOffice.Org 3.0's application, Impress or Presentation, will definitely be an improvement over the current version. However, it looks like it will not have the ability to perform the same very slick & amazing slide transitions & animations especially those available in Apple's Keynote. There is still room for improvement.

With LCDs being the standard in most places, using both the native resolution of your monitor as well as having fonts, icons, buttons, etc big enough for all users to see is a nice feature of any desktop.

As it is now, Gnome has panel size adjustment, font sizes, and others. Wouldn't it be nice to link them all together?

Since Gnome's concept is KISS (keep it simple, stupid), having a slider which adjusted the size of everything at once would be nice. It could keep existing size ratio during the size adjustment. This way, if the user had manually made the font sizes bigger for example, the adjustment would keep them that percentage larger than everything else. Should be very simple to pull off, and I think it would make for a great feature of the Gnome desktop.

The ubuntu console is quite bland by default, syntax highlighting (like that found in gentoo) can provide a better aesthetic as well as improve the usability of the terminal.

To define my default action when a photo camera, video camera, palm, webcam is connected I must go to system > preferences > removable medias ("Périphérique et médias amovibles" in french), and it has a cd logo.

But to define my default actions when a audio cd, data cd, blank cd, dvd, ... is inserted I must go in nautilus preferences.

I think we should have a single place to define all the default actions.