In addition to those who are testing the daily builds, we’d like to have some feedback on the usability of the color scheme. To do this, backup your ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc and replace the original file with this file (remember to rename it as terminalrc if you are downloading it directly). Note that this file might override some of your terminal settings, which is why you should backup your terminalrc. If you want, you can just replace any lines with Color in the original file with the lines from the new terminalrc.

After you’ve tested it for some time, get back to us at #xubuntu-devel at Freenode or the Xubuntu developer mailing list and give feedback – both positive and negative. Thanks for helping us out!

Much more pronounced, clear and professional than before, right?

In the following days, we will go through the content once more and update bits here and there. We are not aiming for a perfect site on-launch (even if that would be nice!) but releasing the new site as soon as possible and fixing the bugs and deficiencies along the way with you, our followers.

If you want to be helpful, you can either join us at #xubuntu-devel now to discuss the content before release or wait until the release and getting in contact with us as soon as you find a bug.

Getting these plugins published was not a simple task. Some of them needed – and some of them still need – quite heavy code review, and some even need near complete rewriting! For example, the Simple Planet plugin not only uses the new Widget class now, but it’s also using Simplepie instead Magpie, of which latter is still working, but deprecated in WordPress.

Plugins already in the repository

• Interactive Images, formerly known as ImgCapt. With Interactive Images, you can upload images and add user-readable notes to them. See example on the Shimmer for gmusicbrowser -page. To see the current issues with the plugin, see the Interactive Images issues in Github.
• One Year Earlier, formerly known as LastYear. A very simple plugin that fetches an article from a year ago and shows its title and excerpt with a “More”-link as a widget.
• Simple Planet, formerly known as myPlanet. Another simple plugin that loads n newest articles from the feeds listed in the widget properties.

Plugins to be added to the repository

• Compact & Chronological, formerly known as Yearly Archives. This is a really simple plugin that shows the chronological archive in a more compact way. See for yourself in the Search & Browse -page at this website! This is most probably the most widespread plugin I’ve written, and it only needs a quick review before ending in the repository.
• Photoslider, formerly known as PicSlide, which is used in several sites. There are some parts that work as supposed, but while the plugin is relatively mature, I need to set some feasible defaults as well as add per-widget/shortcode -settings and probably extend it with some more options, like transition type. Once the plugin is cleaned up a bit, I will upload it to the repository and continue hacking on it. I am already tracking issues for Photoslider in Github.
• Projects Catalog 2.0, which is the plugin running the Shimmer Project project listings. Before uploading to the repository, the plugin still needs some review, and some parts will probably need to be rewritten, since we plan doing some bigger updated for the Shimmer site.

There is more to come?

In addition, I have a plugin adding extra headers in emails describing the rationale of the message (eg. X-WordPress-Rationale: comment-moderation for messages that asks the user to moderate comments) that I think should be in the core, efficiently adding a rationale for every type of email sent. I will pursue getting this added in the core when I have more time on my hands.

There is some odds and ends around all of my WordPress-installations, and I need to go through that. Some of the stuff is strictly work-related and must stay work-only, but some of it might be available to publishing – and maybe even useful for somebody…

In the following weeks, I need to look at the statistics plugins the WordPress plugin directory can offer to me. Unless I find something suitable, I might end up writing a simple plugin myself.

Now, go check out the brand-new WordPress-plugins repository, file any issues and stay tuned for more!

On other news, we talk a bit about work done in the last weeks in the Shimmer Project blog. Check it out!

Have a peaceful Christmas time and a very happy new year 2012!

If we don’t get any counterarguments for the items (see my email about approving roadmap items) and everything goes well, we will be expecting to get at least 11 of these in Precise.

The four roadmap items that still need a separate approvals from the community after the specification writing part, which last all the way to the end of this month, are:

• New default media player (audio)
• Ubiquity “Application sets”
• Rethink shortcut keys
• Clean themes (GTK, xfwm, wallpapers) list

To be honest, I expect at least three of these to get community approval after none to slight discussion and reviewing of the specification.

Yes, you guessed right, the one I’m not sure is the new default media player. It seems that we have had a lot of debate about this during my involvement in Xubuntu; we have changed the default player three times! While I think gmusicbrowser is a wonderful player and am very proud to ship that as our default player, I think there might be some viable alternatives, especially those players that are really simple. A bit like Listen was when we shipped it. I’m waiting the discussion with lots of interest, but I do hope we will have a civil and as objective as possible, discussion to make the best choice for most of our users.

Let’s keep on working hard, and this will be our best release so far, by far!

The first step is to brainstorm all the new features we want in, the bugs we really want to fix and the default applications we want to review. The brainstorming period has already started, and will end on Monday, November 21.

Assignees for ideas should be found during this month. If you want to take an action item, feel free to add your name/nick in the list too already. We will send an another mail asking for assignees for not-yet-taken items on when the brainstorming period is over though, so don’t worry about it just yet. Implementation for the features and other stuff will be expected to happen according to the Ubuntu Precise Pangolin Release Schedule.

Any survey report that doesn’t do any analysis with the content in any way is useless. Especially if you have large amount of data gathered from very different groups of people, you should do some correlation between different questions, to actually spot possible problems in the community. For example, I’d really like to see some correlations and differences in the answers by Canonical employees and volunteers.

A word of few about collaboration

The survey shows that there is various problems with collaboration between the Canonical teams and the community. While this might not be objectively the biggest problem, it is a multi-layered one, with hard-to-find solutions. Especially if there is no change from the Canonical side of things.

There’s a few specific reasons why I think Canonical employees working on Ubuntu should collaborate more with the community.

While 1+1 is not three when you collaborate with other people, it usually does reduce the workload for everybody, since you wouldn’t need to do duplicate work and you would be able to brainstorm with other people to get better results with the first try.

Volunteers in derivatives would have much more information on what is going on, and it would be much easier to get things working again, when you could collaborate with the person who (accidentally) broke something you need. Currently it is nearly impossible to get any non-volunteer to help with broken things in Xubuntu, even if the reason for being broke was a direct outcome of any change in Ubuntu, or the core packages.

With derivative developers not having to use most of their time fixing bugs others made appear, they will have more time in getting the derivatives more user-friendly, stable and even more feature-rich. The more interesting and well-working a product is the more people want to use it. This applies to Ubuntu and it’s derivatives too, so this would certainly attract more users to Ubuntu, too.

First step forward, but are we going the right way?

I heard there is a new “If you break it, you fix it” -policy coming up. I really hope this works as expected and applies to new versions of packages breaking other packages too. My main concern is that this will not apply to Canonical employees or other core developers, permanently or via exceptions.

Only future will tell.

I will be back any time between Saturday, 5th of November, 22 UTC and Monday, 7th of November, 20 UTC.