unity-dev team mailing list archive

["Stephen M. Webb" <stephen.webb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all, here's an update on the state of Unity 7 as of 2014-03-5 as we make our way towards Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

We spent the first part of this cycle working on a few enhancements to make life better over the lifetmie of the
upcoming Ubuntu LTS release, as well as put a lot of focus on making sure our automated test suite has broad coverage
and remains useful.  Most of you will never see the results of the latter effort, and really, that's the point: catch
and fix problems before they get released into the wild.

We're currently generally on-track with our plans [1].

In the last couple of weeks the results of our hard work has been hitting desktops everywhere.  Here's a recap of some
of our changes.

Unity 7

(1) We have finally delivered locally integrated menus (menus can be configured to appear in the window title bar
instead of the Unity Panel at the top of the screen.  This is important for the larger displays that many folks have on
their desks these days, and it's a configurable option for those with smaller laptops or just a preference.

This change has been well received by reviewers.  We even made a video to introduce it [2], but we have yet to be
contacted by the Academy about our award.

(2) A lot of changes have been going in to support high-DPI displays to remove the squint factor.  More and more of
these devices are falling in to people's hands and, well, they caused problems with some older eyes at the very least.
We no have a per-monitor slider in the control center that you can use to adjust the scaling of window decorations and
other parts of the Unity shell.  Work continues on this to make it look ever better.

(3) A considerable amount of work has gone in to adjusting how hotkeys are handled across various parts of the desktop
stack.  Hopefully this should resolve a number of problems, especially in localized situations.

(4) Multi-touch enhancements have been backburnered because of resource constraints.  No regressions, but we may not
achieve the enhancements we planned back in November.

Of course, there's been lots of bug fixing going on.  A list of actual bugs closed would stretch on for pages and this
recap is already tl;dr.

Unity 8 on the Desktop

(5) We have a Unity8 demo session you can log in to from LightDM and test out running apps on your desktop.  Full
functionality of this is currently blocked by problems in Mir so it's not entirely useful yet, but fixes have been
pending for several upstream releases now so they should get resolved soon.

(6) A while back Brandon Schaefer completed a port of the SDL library to Mir and it got accepted upstream.  It's
currently working its way through the libSDL release process and will hopefully land in Debian soon, where we can pick
it up.  This tweak enables games, and in particular Steam games, under Unity 8 on the desktop.

The flavours beta has been released:  this is the traditional time for developers to upgrade their systems to the next
release and start dogfooding.  that means it's time for everyone to start using the latest Unity 7 so we can get wider
real-world testing and better feedback on our latest changes before final release in April. The Trusty Tahr is very
stable and ready for daily use.


[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/topic-trusty-unity7-polish
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzFXRz-b3Ns&feature=youtu.be

-- 
Stephen M. Webb  <stephen.webb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>