Contributor mikemaccana

The development of Xara Xtreme (the best open source vector graphics editor ever) which beats any other vector graphics application, like Inkscape or SK1 by mere lightyears, seems to have come to a halt. It still stands out in performance, functionality and usability, but sadly enough not a lot of people seem to be willing to dedicate their time to the development of this beatiful application.

The last stable build was published in 2006 and after that, new development seemed to focus on the OSX version. There are many Ubuntu users making extensive use of Xara, but sadly enough it is not getting the focus it should get.

Still, there are some bugs in Xara that should be solved, like crashing after exporting a file to jpg.

Development of Xara must be picked up!

Totem is a good player, but vlc is much better. Please put the best software as default in ubuntu, because the problems of new users , coming from windows, will decrease a lot with vlc, that recognise more codecs than totem.

I think the feature set of brainstorm is sufficient enough to support the idea it was created for. All these ideas that people post to improve brainstorm are very nice and very helpful but they start to clutter up the lists. Look at the categories list... they actually had to create a separate category for brainstorm.

Remember this site is dedicated to ideas mainly to improve the ubuntu product (mainly the distribution). This is just my opinion of course.

I haven't counted but it feels like almost half the idea's are improvements to brainstorm. The implemented brainstorm idea's don't have to remain in the lists do they?

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.

There has been some confusion, but to clarify this brainstorm:

There is an official deviantart "theme" competition which requests new wallpapers and allows new themes to be inside the submission. However, there are two issues:
1) the contest requires the construction of a wallpaper
2) themes and mockups are ungraded and unacknowledged.

This brainstorm argues two amendments:
1)Mockups-only submissions with previous ubuntu wallpapers should be allowed. Wallpapers should not be required. Mockups shouldn't have to be GTK themes.
2)Even if only wallpapers get prizes, there should be a best-mockup recognition award to the best non-wallpaper aspect of submissions. (arguably, themes are harder to judge than wallpapers.)

This would allowed skilled UI designers who are unskilled artists to compete to win consideration by the ubuntu team. I'd like to see mockups of theme ideas that are abstract and un-artistic, like https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Hardy/Alternate/round_edge , be able to be in the running for this competition. We want to improve the ubuntu look and feel, not just reskin it.

Sorry for the confusion. Here's the original brainstorm text:

Recently, a brainstorm idea was created for a DeviantArt theme mock-up competition for Ubuntu 8.10. It was accepted, but canonical changed the competition's scope from themes to just wallpapers only.

There's a great deal of interest by the general ubuntu art community to create a new theme for ubuntu, as seen by the Hardy incoming "alternate looks" page, yet this competition was changed from its original scope to a far less interesting scope.



[....]

It would be nice to see Ubuntu integrate global mouse gestures. Of course these would be optional and configurable, but in my opinion mouse gestures greatly improve productivity, and Ubuntu could pioneer their implementation in an out-of-the-box OS, putting it that much further ahead of Windows and Mac.

Since Brasero is being installed by default, and in order to keep consistency through the system, the "places → CD creator" menu item should launch it instead of Nautilus CD burner.

In order to avoid duplication, too, NCB should be removed altogether.

a lot of times, text is not copied. even if i cut, the selected text disapears in firefox and isn't pasteable in pidgin. sometimes the clipboard is an older version, if i paste.

I haven't a clue which ideas I've read, so I'd like to be able to filter out the ones I've already seen.

Ubuntu ships with GIMP as preinstalled graphics program. GIMP is a really impressive tool, once you figured out how it works. But there are a lot of people out there, who only need a fraction of the things GIMP can do. There are a lot of simple image editing tasks which can be done with simple programs:

John needs some help to do certain things on Ubuntu. He takes a screenshot of a program and tries to mark his problem with a hand painted error and some text.

Mark has been on a conference trip. He want's to remember the people he met, so he pulls a group picture from his digicam and marks everyone with a name tag.

Under MS Windows MS Paint fills this gap. Don't lough, I know a lot of people who use this program quite often. It does exactly what those people want to do. Nothing more, nothing less. For linux there are some mspaint alternatives [1][2]. But they could need some makeover (in the case of gpaint) or a targeted at a different users (tuxpaint is a program for kids).

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gpaint/
[2] http://www.tuxpaint.org/

Sometimes it's unconfortable when you're searching some files (for example when compiling and installing a program) and when you are "inside" the folder in the file manager, you want to compile. You need the terminal.

So, you need to reach the folder and reach that folder typing all the way to do it, and it's very tedious when the program name is too long.

I suggest that in the menu (File menu) it would appear an item called "Open Terminal in this folder" or simply "Open terminal".

If a user tries to open a .txt file created in Windows, it will always ask them whether to open or run it.

I understand why, and I know it's just a setting in Nautilus Preferences (under Behavior), but it's enough to annoy new users and make the user experience less smooth and intuitive.

Maybe only unknown (or commonly executable) file extensions should prompt - and just open/view files with extensions like TXT and RTF.

I have a USB keyboard and it works in the BIOS, but it doesn't work in GRUB.

This could confuse new users, especially if they want to change the language of the boot cd.

Isn't this a critical point?

;-)

When minimizing Evolution it should be placed in the systray as icon. An email client is opened the whole session in most cases and since evolution informs via the tray icon about new mails a task bar entry is not needed.

I Like apt but there shoud be a way to install a programm like under Windows.

PCBsd have this already and is called PBI.

If you use a keys combination that it's important to the computer the program should tell you that. for example: ctrl + right key: if you use this combination for music you lose the use while writing.
Sorry about my english.

I believe that a "standard installer package" as in Windows platform which does all the job for you to install any application will appeal more people and make it easy to move from other OS's to Ubuntu. It is really difficult and complicated for a newbie to install application in Ubuntu. For instance, when I first moved to Ubuntu from XP, I wanted to download and use my favorite programs like VLC player, i really didn't know what to do after I downloaded the file. If it was a single "installer" file, all I needed to do was to click it twice and there you go! My friends also complained that "compiling" to install applications is hard to prefer while they have an opportunity to install any file with a couple of clicks.

In my opinion, that would be more appealing for non-Ubuntu users.

It would be nice if repositories could be saved as files in a folder (with subfolders for universe, multiverse etc...). That way it would be possible to drag&drop them there. Then with a repositories manager you could enable/disable them.

IRSSI is a command line IRC client.

It would be nice if it were included by default and you had a CLI command like "onlinehelp" that would start IRSSI and then enter into the #Ubuntu channel on Freenode, giving the user a generic username like LiveDiskUser#### or NewUser####.

This would be very helpful for beginners who are having graphical trouble. If for some reason they were reduced to the CLI, they could still ask for help on IRC and receive live help which could enable them to get their system running.

This is dependant of course on the computer having a working network connection, but many non-wireless broadband enabled machines DO have a network connection upon first boot. So I think the possible number of people it would help could potentially be very big.

Nowadays ubuntu recognize jpeg and some other formats without check their extensions just using magic numbers.
I suggest to improve this way including OpenOffice.org files.
I've found a lot of files without the extension or with a fake extension on internet; improving this kind of file recognition we won't have this kind of problem with a larger number of file type.