Contributor belovedmonster

The Ubuntu home page makes no mention of brainstorm. The news on the home page doesn't even mention this site launching. Clicking on Community/Get Involved brings up a page which makes absolutely no mention of brainstorm!!

HOW ARE PEOPLE GOING TO KNOW THIS EXCELLENT SITE EXISTS?

Please make it easy for people to find their way here.

Why you aren't shouting from the roof tops on your home page about this new feature I do not know!

One thing that always throws me when using Rhythmbox is the way the Play button is a pause button when playing a song but the icon remains a "play" icon. So in order to pause a song you have to press a play icon again. This is really bad interface design.

Every other music app I've ever used has the icon change to denote the new function. When the button plays its a play icon and when it pauses its a pause icon. Why doesn't rhythmbox do this?

Everyone by now has seen the world famous mockups of what Ubuntu apparently should look like. The problem is that what is shown in those mockups is not yet possible with the current way gnome works.

I worry with everyone clambering for this mythical theme and with time running out before 8.10 ships, what will end up happening is Ubuntu will ship with the same old problematic brown and orange theme that is so hated by a lot of people.

There is a solution though...

The Dust theme
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/DustTheme

The Dust theme has gotten a lot of praises on Digg and is easily as sexy as anything I've personally seen for Linux (and I'm not usually a fan of dark themes), bust most promising of all... is actually possible with the current technology we have at our disposal.

It's time to be bold! Stop defaulting to the same brown and orange and make a big bold change. Embrace Dust.

Yes you will get a few idiots who will say it's too like Vista just because it's black, but ignore them people. The wider tech community will praise Ubuntu for finally ditching its dorky themes and becoming sophisticated and sexy. New users will be eager to try out this Ubuntu thing they have heard so much about.

Enough with the OSX style swirls. From now on lets have a striking image FOR EVERY RELEASE. The current 8.04 wallpaper is just so much more stylish and rememberable than generic swirls.

My suggestion would be to make each wallpaper tie in with the animal name. Like there were some pretty cool Gibson graphics being used on tshirts and the like but why couldn't they have been used as part of the wallpaper? They would have been just as striking as the new Heron one.

I think there is perhaps a side benefit to using the animal name as every graphical designer gets 8 months heads up on the next name and hence the next theme of the graphic, so there should be no reason why come release time you wont have a bunch of cool graphics to choose from.

Every 2 weeks you should write a blog entry about which ideas caught the eye of developers, which ones shouldn't be submitted anymore because its currently in work, which ones surprised developers as being as popular as they were, any trends you are spotting. Just generally give some feedback on the suggestions here. Otherwise you are in risk of people thinking this is a one way process with people never getting any feedback on what the developers make of their ideas.

The Gimp project has a site where people can propose new ideas for the next GIMP GUI, and after every 25 submissions the developers post a blog explaining what they made of the ideas. Even if its just a short list of what trends they spotted over the last few weeks it's always interesting to read and gives you a sense that your suggestions are actually being considered.

I think Brainstorm needs something similar.

One thing that drives me potty about Totem and Rhythmbox is that unlike all the other apps I've used (on windows) you can't simply click anywhere on the "timeline" to move to that portion of the song/video instead you have to actually click on the moving playhead marker and drag it where you want.

So if I want to skip to the last 30 seconds of a song I can't just click near the end of the timeline, I have to actually drag the playhead all the way across to the end.


Which do you think is easiest? ....

Click
or
Click + drag + release

I'll give you a clue. It aint the the process that takes 3 steps!

Linux does a great job at creating thumbnails for pictures and videos, but music is left as just a generic audio icon. Clearly this is because it's hard to represent an audio file visually. But actually, why couldn't album art be used? Obviously some audio files would stay generic icons as they are not professional albums, but a large majority of audio files could now have a visual representation.

Perhaps there could be some plugin for your file browser that collects the album artwork from your default mp3 software, or maybe the file browser could connect directly to the internet to get them itself?

Maybe the icons could also have a number in the top corner denoting the album track.

I just read the blog post about the new boxed retail version of Ubuntu available and this image was used to show the box art.

http://blog.canonical.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/bestbuy.jpg

Sorry, but since when did a professional company with millions of users just dump a lame ass blurry picture like this into an official press release/blog post?

Shuttleworth talks about aspiring to be as good as OS X. Do you think Apple would have a blurry snap shot of Leopards box art in a press release? Man it bugs me so much that you guys don’t take this stuff seriously. IMAGE IS EVERYTHING when attracting new users.

I love what you guys do, but you need to pull the finger out and realise that you’ve got to look professional at all times. Canonical come across as a half arsed amateur operation far too often.

You need to make sure that every document, press release, blog post, and piece of information that comes out of Canonical looks professional at all times, otherwise you need someone to say "No way is that going out in its present state. Fix it!".

Having the new Amazon mp3 download software is a great first step. But what we need to persuade Amazon to do is create a version of the downloader that works directly in our music applications via a plugin, so you can purchase music directly in your application much the same way you can purchase tunes directly from iTunes.

This is directly inspired by another suggestion to sell Ubuntu in stores for $5 which I dont think would work.

The only way selling Ubuntu will work is if it cost enough that people felt they were buying a proper product, but also felt that extra cost was getting them value for money.

Hence I think you need to sell some sort of bundle of items labled as like a Starter kit. It would contain everything you need to get going with Ubuntu. Eg. all the Ubuntu distros (XFCE etc), a printed manual/starter guide, a DVD video guide, maybe 30 days tech support or something, other stuff like stickers.

I know Linux distros used to use this business model of selling retail copies with an instruction booklet back in the day, but I think now is a time that it might actually work, especially as Ubuntu is a big brand name.

It's in Linuxs best interest for it to get shrink wrapped and on store shelves so it can win the hearts and minds of average computer users.

Title says it all. Its ugly.

This wouldn't be a killer feature by any means, but it would feel so much nicer using synaptic if typing in the search box filtered results in real time like Rhythmbox or any other good mp3 app.

So, as you type each letter the results become more accurate. To the point that you might only need to type Firef... to bring up all the Firefox stuff.

One day I'd like to see the feature where you can change the point at which your file browser takes its thumbnail, so if a really terrible thumbnail comes up you can change it.

When I install Firefox manually on my windows machine I get to download a UK version and it has the UK spelling installed by default, it has all the search engines set up for the UK such as ebay.co.uk instead of .com, all in all it is just set up for my needs in the UK.

When using Firefox on Ubuntu I am stuck with a generic version that assumes I want to spell in US English and buy books from the US version of Amazon.

Since I have to tell Ubuntu where I live during the installation process why can't this information be used download a Firefox appropriate to my region?

I use Xubuntu but I presume this is true of other versions of Ubuntu.

I find from time to time I'll get a popup from the system tray that rather than giving me any actual information says something like "Something needs your attention, click the icon for more information" ...(Sorry I cant remember the exact wording).

Point is, the popup could just tell me what it is I need to do, but instead it tells me I need to click on the icon to find out what I need to do.

Urm?? WHY? I'd love to hear someone explain to me how this is good GUI and how Windows is doing it wrong by having the information in the first popup.

Everytime one of these meaningless popups comes up I always wonder why the information isnt in the popup to begin with.

I recently wanted to get more involved in the development of my favourite open source projects (including Xubuntu). But often I found the only way to get involved was a mailing list. When I signed up for the mailing lists I was surprised just how clunky and unintuitive they were compared to internet forums, and how little functionality they had. Plus there is something about communicating directly via email like that which is very intimidating to a new user.

In this day and age of several open source forum/messageboard systems with features coming out of their ears, all with email subscription controls and probably RSS feeds too, why are developers still using the antiquated, frankly crappy mailing lists of old?

It seems like its such a traditional,ingrained thing to use mailing lists if you are an open source developer that they all keep using them even when there are better solutions out there.

I would like to see more projects making use of more modern, sophisticated tools. I am talking about forums here but perhaps it could be something else all together, I'm not really up on what is out there for collaborations and communication, but whatever you use it certainly doesn't need to be a mailing list with it's ugly text email with zero functionality besides getting your inbox filled with conversations better suited to a forum thread.

If it sounds like I am just moaning then you are missing the point, that if you had an attractive, easy to use forum with different catagories for different suggestions and development topics then you would get sooooo many more people joining in.

Ditch mailing lists, they suck!

When the original poster of a brainstorm writes a comment on their idea it should be visually different or have an icon next to the name to denote that it is the original poster. Otherwise it isnt always obvious that it is a comment by the original poster and not just another user.

When Apple unveiled the Macbook Air they announced a feature called Remote Disc to get around the limitation of no optical drive by allowing you to install a bit of software on another computer and use that computer's drive wirelessly.

With computers like the EEEPC making huge inroads we could soon find that a large percentage of Linux users have computers without optical drives. We need to create software to get around this problem in the same way Apple have.

I don't know what Ubuntu's policy would be in terms of using the site to make money with links to outside sites, so feel free to vote this down if its commercialism upsets you, but it just occurred to me...

If Ubuntu had a really nice hardware database could you not generate money towards Ubuntu by having a small "check for prices" type link beside hardware.

Ie. I see a Logitech webcam that is voted 5 out 5 by the social voting system you would want to implement in a new hardware database site. Beside that 5 out of 5 rating I see a link to compare prices/and or buy. Bobs your uncle you generate some money and it helps to pay for the continued excellence of Ubuntu.

I've filled out a few bugs on Launchpad but I've never really felt as if I knew what I was doing or if I was filling out the bug report with the right information that would be helpful.

I just filled out a gnome bug report and it was soooo much easier and nicer to do because rather than just there being a blank text box for me to fill out instead the bug report was split into questions I had to answer.

-Please describe the problem
-How can the problem be reproduced (this answer was already numbed 1-3 to show you that it needs to be easy to follow commands.)
-What actually happens when you follow these steps?
-What would you expect to happen when you follow them?
-Does this happen every time?
-If you have any other information to add to this report, please enter it here:

The difference between filling out a Gnome bug and a Launchpad one was like night and day for me. I felt like I had my hand held through the entire process with gnome rather than just being expected to know what to write. I would rate Gnome 10 out 10 for ease of use.

Experienced launchpad users may scoff at the idea of a more hand holding approach, but think about it, it's in your best interest to get as many people submitting bugs as possible, and its in your best interest that these bugs be as clear and concise as possible. Switching to an approach where it is more like a questionnaire than a blank box would help enormously. I found that not only did I enjoy the experience more with gnome but I also found my resulting bug was more concise to read and better written.