Re: [Ayatana] Farewell to the notification area

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

> That's true, we haven't done as good a job of communication in the past
> as we could have. But we're working on improving it. For this issue
> yesterday there were posts on design.canonical.com,
> markshuttleworth.com, this mailing list, Twitter, and Identica.

And I thank you and Mark for those, I'm glad to finally have a more or
less "central" reference to point people to when they ask me what the
indicators are all about. :)

> I'm not sure where would be an appropriate place on the Forums to start
> the conversation as well. Do you have a suggestion?

The problem is that the issue is not restricted to the forums. Fact is,
right now a new user has no way of figuring out the functionality of
the indicators without Googling. I think users need a "getting started"
tutorial. The installation slideshow is great but its time is limited
and there is a limit on what can be explained through text and static
images.

What would be *great* is a nice *video* screencast introduction. Time
and technical requirements aside, it would be awesome if there was a
professional video with Mark himself or <insert famous artist here>
popping up in the middle of a Ubuntu Desktop, pointing and explaining
specific features. :)

With respect to the forums, I'm gonna give a controversial suggestion:
the Lucid (soon to be Maverick) section needs to be more strictly
moderated and controlled than the other sections. If someone repeats
a question, the thread should be immediately closed and forgotten
after the user is referred to an already given answer. And the most
common answers should be made into stickies. Rants that confuse bugs
with design decisions should also be immediately closed.

> I'm not familiar with how heavily Empathy has been patched, but in
> general, that's a QA process problem, not an engineering problem. Bug
> reports on Ubuntu applications should be reported at
> bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu. They should then be reposted upstream *if*
> they also exist in the upstream version.

I agree, but anyway the bug reporting part was not the main point.

What I want to emphasize is what I said in the beginning of the
paragraph, that more emphasis should be put on backwards
compatibility.  In the case of Empathy, either the patches
should be improved to gracefully degrade when indicator-messages
is not present or a empathy-vanilla package should be made
available in the repositories.