Contributor _alex_

The timeline in Totem should also be used as a progress bar to indicate how far Totem has buffered streaming videos. Also allow seeking anywhere in the buffered region. Here's a screenshot showing this in action on YouTube's player: http://s4.tinypic.com/9blv8g.jpg

The progress bar is also present in the default media players on other OSes, so many people are used to it.

With the millionth vote coming up, it's time to expand brainstorm to become the de facto site where developers and users of various OSS projects connect to share ideas.

The way I envision this is:
- As a user with an idea for a particular project (let's say Thunderbird), I would do the following to submit it:
1. Select "Thunderbird" from a drop down of various projects.
2. Select the category of the idea.
3. Check for duplicates.
4. Submit

- As a user who is using a certain set of software (let's say Ubuntu, Thunderbird, Gnome Do). I would, in my profile:
1. Select to filter ideas only for the software projects that I use (i.e., "Ubuntu, Thunderbird, Gnome Do" in this case).
2. That way ideas that are not relevant to me will not be displayed, and I will only see the top daily ideas that interest me.

- As a developer of a particular project (e.g., Pidgin), I would have the option to:
1. Display the top ideas for my project ("Pidgin" in this case)
2. Comment on- and manage ideas related to my project

Further down the road, this could be integrated into the software by providing an open "idea" API. So that right from the software's menu I could select Help > Submit Idea.

As this site has proven our community is full of great ideas. What we need is to expand this so that more OSS projects can benefit. What do you guys think?

OS X has this nifty feature that automatically detects text fragments like appointments and addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.
http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/images/300_mail_auto_address_20071016.p ng

GNOME should offer this functionality for all text fields, so that developers can enable this in Evolution, Pidgin, Firefox, etc.

This way every time I get an email with details of an event, I just hover over or select the text containing location and date information and choose "Add Appointment" from a drop down. This action would bring up the calendar with the information parsed from the text filled in. Similarly when my Pidgin buddy sends me his address info, I just right click it and select map location (this would pull up google maps for example) etc.

This is the kind of integration, ease of use and attention to detail that is direly needed in Ubuntu (and GNOME in particular).

Edit: See comments for more brainstorming :)

This is part 1 of an epic series of ideas on how to make search in Ubuntu not suck. In this idea we'll look at features for more advanced users. The following applies to all search fields where it makes sense (this includes Tracker and Nautilus):

1. Support keywords (a la Google search). For example: "Boulevard of Broken Searches filetype:mp3". This would look for mp3s of the preceding name (not that this song remix actually exists, though it probably should). Here "filetype" is the keyword (same as in Google). Another example: "*.jpg size:<1M" -- find JPEGs less than 1 megabyte in size. If additional metadata is supported (say by Tracker): "*.mp3 rating:>3". This would find all mp3s with a rating greater than 3. More on the metadata thing in another episode.

2. Support wildcards: * + - | , & and or not
For example "*.jpg, *.png" would look for images of the two file types. "+search -great" would look for files that have the word "search" in them, but not the word "great". Use your inference skills to figure out what the other wildcards do. Note: there is some redundancy!

3. Support regular expressions. Wildcards are okay for novices, but us experts need more power at our fingertips.

This idea in our epic series awaits your vote. Tongue-in-cheek comments are not only welcomed, but also solicited :)

This was Part 1 of the epic Search Suckage In Ubuntu Series (SSIUS). Read and vote on Part 2 and Part 3 here!

Currently I have to click on the user in the list or type their name before I can type their password, even if there's only one user. why? Just select the top user and let me type the password right of the bat. If I wanted to type the user name, I'd not choose to use a list as the login window in the first place.

This is how it should work:

1. Select the top (or default) user entry by default (so that I can just type the password & hit enter to login)
2. Allow arrow keys to navigate the list of users (I should neither have to use a mouse to select a user from the list, nor to type the full username, as that's what the default login window is there for)

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ FULLY BEFORE VOTING

This is part 2 of an epic series of ideas on how to make search in Ubuntu not suck. For part 1 click here. In this idea we look at how to integrate Tracker metadata into Nautilus (the file browser).

When a file in Nautilus is selected, the status bar should expand to show information about the file, including editable tracker metadata. The matadata could be context sensitive, and include tags, as well as ratings, artist, and genre information for music, author and title for PDFs, etc.

Some of this metadata should be directly editable in the status bar. (I say *some* because it makes sense for ratings, but not song play counts etc).

As discussed in the previous idea, exposing the metadata to the user in an intuitive manner will greatly enhance usability. For example: without the use of any music player, one could generate a playlist of top rated songs simply by typing the following into Nautilus' search bar: "*.mp3 rating:5". That is, list all songs with a rating of 5 stars. And remember that songs can be rated directly in Nautilus!

If the idea of smart search folders is incorporated with this, one could simply set up virtual search folders for top 10 played songs, recently accessed files of filetype:pdf, etc. Just spend some time thinking about various scenarios where this would be useful to you. Imagine the organizational power that you get at your finger tips! And how intuitive this would be!

In the next idea in this series we'll look at further integrating Tracker with applications. Stay tuned :)

Read and vote on Part 1 and Part 3 here!

Currently the gnome panel can be themed by right clicking it, selecting properties and setting color/transparency/background image.
The window list however cannot be themed in a similar way. This makes it look out of place, particularly for transparent panels, such as in this theme (see bottom panel):
http://img107.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bluexr4.png

The following image is an example of what could be done if the window list allowed setting color/transparency/background image (for each of the possible window states):
http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=70925&d=1211323929

I have 5 different IMAP accounts. Setting up search folders to aggregate email from the Inboxes/Junk/Drafts/Sent/Trash is a painfully slow process. Even more annoyingly, selecting an IMAP Inbox folder causes Evolution to check the mail, but not so for an aggregated Inbox search folder.

Evolution should provide a one-click option to collapse the IMAP/POP accounts into a single "Virtual" Account with one inbox, one junk folder, etc. Furthermore, the default action should be to place Junk/Sent/Deleted into the corresponding folder on the corresponding IMAP account rather than into a local folder. Evolution should ask to create the folder structure if it's not already present on the server (or intelligently guess the folders if it is---with a confirmation dialog for the user).

As is already implemented, when replying the correct account should be selected. Thus, essentially all operations are done within each email account, but to the user this appears as a single "virtual" account.

Search in Ubuntu is broken or nearly useless in most places.

1. Fix Tracker quirks: http://s4.tinypic.com/awq1s2.jpg
2. Make Nautilus search faster.
3. Show search results as you type
4. Option to search by file name only (and/or content)
5. Rank files by relevancy. Relevancy is composed of:
- Number of matching query terms
- Date (files: last accessed, emails: date received, etc)
- Location of file (e.g. ~/ vs /usr vs .gnome2/)
- etc
6. Integrate Tracker tagging into Nautilus (Expand the status bar to display additional context sensitive info for selected file, including a field to add/edit tracker tags).
7. Support regular expressions in searches for advanced users
8. Support keywords in searches a la google (e.g. "journey filetype:mp3", "*.mp3 rating:>3", etc)
9. Support wildcards: * + - | & and or not
10. Saved search folders.

All of the above should be exposed to applications as well. For example, searching in Evolution would find emails as you type, allow wildcards, regex, keywords (e.g. "subject='[Bug*'"), etc.

Feel free to suggest other fixes for various search deficiencies in Ubuntu and I'll add them to this idea.