Sunday 30 October 2011

6 months on Unity

We have just finished another design sprint prior to UDS-P.

While talking with some others I realise that I have worked on Unity for six months, and not changed a single pixel on the output.  No graphical changes, no moving widgets, no changing colours.

So what have I been doing?

First step was getting some new coding standards accepted by the team, which was much easier than I was expecting.

I added some property classes to nux, and did some general clean up in the code of nux and unity.

Refactored the indicator internals for the panel service which started off the shared unity core library for sharing code between the 2D and 3D code-bases.

Then I focused primarily on fixing memory leaks and crashes.

Once we hit final freeze, I did a little more refactoring internally, and now we are on to Precise Pangolin.

2 comments:

Monsterlemon said...

Still hating the top menu I'm afraid. And still convinced that menus that only appear on mouseover are a UX faux pas.

The top menu is fine for maximised windows and/or tiny screens (and I know that some people maximise everything), but I have a 24" iMac and this is one of the reasons I've preferred Ubuntu to OS X (OS X having had that particular painful misfeature from the word go).

Seriously, someone buy Mark a bigger monitor ;-)

Anonymous said...

The top (global) menu certainly takes some getting used to, but it takes only a double click on the panel to have a separate menu if you want it. I'm quite impressed by Unity, especially now that I'm learning the keyboard shortcuts. You can do most things without touching a mouse, and very quickly. You could do this with the old top-panel pull-down menus of course, but it was a lot slower. I installed 11.10 on a spare partition, just to try it, but I'm currently using it as my default OS. So far, I like it.