[Ayatana] Flies in the Ice Cream...

[Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx>]

Recently, I've noticed several usability issues in Ubuntu that really are big annoyances that I think are being overlooked. After watching Mark's keynote the other day I thought I'd pen them down to see if perhaps we can fix some of them this cycle. I'm never sure if the Ayatana list is for general usability issues, or just specifically for usability features (e.g. indicators) so if this is OT I apologise.

The first one is the following use-case: A user wants Empathy to start on login.

Now, right now, stop what you are doing and go and make Empathy start on login without Googling for help or using the terminal.

Some of you will search Empathy's preferences; you guys are wrong.
Some of you will head for Startup Applications, you won't find it in the list, you will click add and then stare at a horrible dialog that leaves you no clue what to do next.

This is a common use case, not just for Empathy but also for email clients, or browsers. Why is it so hard? Why when I click browse on the dialog am I sent to a file browser rather than a list of applications? Why isn't Empathy in the list by default if it's installed? (BUG: https://bugs.launchpad.net/empathy/+bug/322314)

My dream would be that we'd have a decent task scheduler so that we could set applications to start on login, at certain times, or when the network is connected.

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OK, the second one. My mouse has 3 extra buttons aside from the normal 3 + scroll. None of them do anything, I'd like to map them to actions like I would do if I was on Windows with the mouse software installed. 

I go to System->Preferences->Mouse; nothing there.
So I go to Google, and what do I find? This monstrosity: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ManyButtonsMouseHowto

Here's a quote:

"Download and install imwheel using Synaptic, Adept, or apt-get

Modify your /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc or ~/.imwheelrc file to tell imwheel what to do with a mouse click when it happens in a particular application. See the Wikis referenced below for details on what you can do with your imwheelrc or .imwheelrc file. NOTE: You can use modifications to the ~/.imwheelrc to limit imwheel behavior to specific users on your system.

Finally, if desired, tell X11 to run imwheel whenever X11 is started (modifying /etc/X11/Xsession.d/60imwheel_start-imwheel and changing IMWHEEL_START=0 to =1 in /etc/X11/imwheel/startup.conf). Alternately, you can start imwheel manually."

Needless to say, I still don't have those mouse buttons mapped, because I can't be bothered with that. And I'm a *technical* user, god help any normal user that realises their extra mouse buttons don't work.

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My final use-case is a less common one, but it is an *actual* situation that my girlfriend found herself in using UNE the other day, and without me diagnosing and fixing it, she would have had no hope at all. I think this is a poor design decision in Gtk+...

Anyway, my girlfriend wanted to upload some photos to a photo-printing website. She needed no help transferring the photos from her camera to her netbook using Nautilus. However, when she went to the Flash-powered website upload she was greeted with a Gtk+ file chooser. When she browsed to the pictures folder, nothing was listed. It turns out that the file filter was *.jpg however, her camera saved her files in upper case with the extension *.JPG. Gtk+ file chooser dialogs are case-sensitive if you use filters rather than mimetypes, and the Actionscript API only allows extensions as filters, which it passes on to Gtk+.

Why would you as a user, or developer, *ever* want the filters in a file chooser to be case sensitive? The only workaround I could find was to type some bash voodoo into a terminal to lowercase all the filenames. I filed this against Flash, both upstream and in launchpad, and as a papercut, although I'm thinking it's really Gtk+ that it needs fixing (BUG: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/655673 )

Anyway, sorry for the long email, what are your thoughts?

Luke.