One Hundred Paper Cuts Round 6 contained some of the easiest-to-fix paper cuts we’ve seen so far, but it made less progress than any previous milestone. Perhaps this is indicative of the psychology behind paper cuts; the bugs that are easiest to fix often get the least attention. The two paper cuts that made discernible progress were:
- “Open location” dialog should not close on invalid path
- Marcus Carlson worked on a couple different patches for this. The most promising approach so far is to return the user to the “Open Location” dialog when the original location is invalid. The patch is awaiting feedback upstream.
- Unmounting a drive sends Nautilus to /media instead of computer://
- Filed upstream. Should be a very small patch. Edit: The great Sebastian Bacher is on the case!
If you’re looking to start your career as an all-star free software contributor, these paper cuts are behind schedule and could benefit from your attention (some of them are really easy to fix!):
- Suggested output when printing a file to PDF is technical and generic “~/output.pdf”
- It appears pretty straightforward to reuse the source filename in the output filename rather than merely using “output.” Also, we’d like to save the PDF to the user’s Desktop instead of her home folder, and set PDF as the default file type (instead of PostScript).
- “Select your time zone from the map” is misleading
- Requires only a single string change.
- Folder names shows uncentered under the [Human] folder icon
- The Human folder icon is slightly off-center — go ahead, take a look inside your Home folder! Shifting it a couple pixels to the right should fix thousands of subtle imbalances across millions of desktops.
- Brushing right-edge of trackpad causes clipboard to paste text
- Middle-clicking should be turned off by default on trackpads. Requires a simple patch to a configuration file.
- “Hardware Drivers” displays empty error dialog when not connected to the network
- A simple patch adding some explanatory text to the empty dialog is needed.
- The modal behavior of “Show Desktop” is confusing
- A small(?) patch is needed to always make “Show Desktop” minimize all windows, unless all windows are already minimized, in which case “Show Desktop” should restore all minimized windows.
- Human theme’s Ubuntu icon uses older style
- This little gem needs some polishing.
- [OpenOffice's] F11 key brings up Style and Formatting instead of Full Screen
- Needs a small patch to the OpenOffice keybinding configuration file to make it use the standard fullscreen shortcut.
5 comments
The GTK+ Print issue might be an app issue. The app should set a document name and we should be using that. It could also be that the print to file backend isn’t able to read that property (or it is not being passed as part of the options).
In any case it should be easy to fix. Same with PDF as default.
We should be fixing 101 papercuts, so that the release document can say “We bring you Ubuntu Karmic Koala with 100+ new papercuts fixes”
I’d love helping you in fixing bugs. I don’t know the GNOME environment so I need a little of mentorship.
* Where are the sources I need
* What I need to compile GNOME
* The dependencies tree (who depends on who?)
* maybe other infos the GNOME devs know I’ll need to know.
If these informations are already available they need to be more advertised.
I hope you’ll point me in the right direction. I’ve free time to spend in OSS development right now but I miss the very basic know how.
I don’t know anything about code, but as user I can tell everyone: thank you, this is a great iniciative, because it solves many little but relevants problems related to user experience.
off topic – just wondering.
in gnome 3.0 how it seems to run on clutter and mutter, will the do dock run on that as I seem to recall reading that it requires compiz for that.
(I do not know the technical details on all this stuff but am a gnome user, so I am wondering if that dock functionality wills till be there with the clutter/mutter gnome 3.0
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