[Ayatana] [Announce] Unity 0.2.18 Released

[Neil Jagdish Patel <neil.patel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'm going to try and make release announcements every week after the
Unity (and supporting libraries) releases, so everyone knows what
important things have changed, what the development team would
appreciate testing on and also important notes. So, here goes:

What's New?

- Global Search in Places
  You can click the CoF, start typing, and expect to see top results of
  that search from across the available places.

- Application Indicator Integration
  From this release you should start to see the initial integration 
  between the Appindicator framework and Unity. This translates to two 
  main (and particularly cool) things:

  1. When an application like Banshee or Tomboy creates and appindicator
     that shows up on your panel, you should see it in the Unity 
     launcher too. This also means that if the application hides it's
     window (like Rhythmbox, Banshee and Tomboy do), it still shows up
     in the launcher with a "running" indicator. We hope that this will
     lead to less confusion for users when these "no-guaranteed-window"
     applications are running. Things like Dropbox, Gnome Power Manager
     etc are automatically ignored (or should be!).

  2. So, we know that the application has an indicator and the awesome
     interface of Appindicator uses a MVC-style menu-exporting system
     using dbusmenu, so what comes to mind next? Stick these   
     application's menus in the quicklists when you right-click on an
     application! This is *very* new so please treat it with care :)

  The idea is to keep the indicators showing in both places (panel and
  launcher) until we've had a chance to weed out all the bugs, and then
  'steal' the indicator from the panel, so you don't have desktop apps
  taking up space in that area of the panel.

Notable Bugfixes

- Sub-menu bug (where you couldn't activate sub-menus of menus opened by
  the panel) has been fixed thanks to a Mutter patch from upstream, so 
  we can finally switch off the dual-menus!
- Support for coloured backgrounds
- Crashes fixed in both Unity and Clutter
- Lots of places clean-ups

What didn't make it (i.e definitely coming next week :) ?

- Quicklist reveal animation
- Multi-monitor support
- Full background scaling/tiling/etc support
- Background slide-show support
- Places file-browsing

Testing of the new features as well as general testing is appreciated.
Bugs should be filed against:

- http://bugs.launchpad.net/unity for UI/crasher/launcher/panel/etc bugs
- http://bugs.launchpad.net/unity-place-files for bugs regarding search
_results_ in the files place
- http://bugs.launchpad.net/unity-place-applications for bugs regarding
search _results_ in the applications

I should also mention, as it doesn't seem to have been before on this
list, that Unity is still pending final visual design, so please don't
take what you see in the builds as final (especially in places), as we
could be using placeholders etc.

Hopefully this post has been helpful :)

Thanks,

-- 
Neil Jagdish Patel
Canonical
27 Floor, Millbank Tower
London SW1P 4QP
+44 7885 625 999
Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings
www.canonical.com