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After a few months of working on all the infrastructure changes needed to start deploying AJAX on Launchpad, we are now ready to start developing the mockups we’ve been working on for the past months in the User Experience team.
To make sure we coordinated the work of 35 distributed developers, and really get the ball rolling 10 of us gathered for a sprint in Berlin and went into full ninja-hacking mode for a week, while defining standards and best practices as we went along.
The outcome of the sprint has been amazing (it’s actually still going on!), and we’re very well prepared to roll out all kind of AJAX goodies like “in-line status editing”, “multi-line editing” and “person pickers” in the next few months. It’s going to be awesome  😉
We have decided on YUI3 as our javascript library, and while it is still not a final version, we are very happy with our decision and it has allowed us to do some really cutting edge work, while maintaining clean and re-usable code.

I’m also very excited about in-line text editing having landed last week in Launchpad’s edge version (used by beta testers), enabling in-line editing of bug titles and project names, which landed thanks to the amazing work of Māris Fogels and Francis Lacoste. For all you non-beta testers, you will see it rolled out late next week.

Since it got rolled out, every time I edit a bug title I get the greatest feeling when presented with this:

A lot more coming soon, so stay tuned!

Hi,

As you hopefully have learned from various sources (blog posts, launchpad-users mailing list, Launchpad Announcement list, Launchpad podcast, beta testing on Staging and Edge, etc) Launchpad’s user interface has been updated based on input from our usability study conducted at UDS Boston and also existing UI bug reports. We plan to deploy these updates this week into production assuming no major issues are uncovered. With this in mind, I’m asking everyone who is willing to please help us test these changes.

If you want to play around with the new UI in our sandbox, head over to https://staging.launchpad.net. Changes here will not affect production.

If you want to use Launchpad with the new UI, head over to https://edge.launchpad.net. Changes here will affect production.

Please report all UI related bugs you find at https://launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+filebug. We will be committing UI updates daily to Staging and Edge until Wednesday and then polishing updates over the next few weeks to address any priority issues that might be uncovered.

UI changes are always rather disruptive and we thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition. We hope you will be pleased by the end result.

Thank you!

Joey Stanford

Welcome to the Coming Changes report for Launchpad 1.1.10 (which is due for release 24th October).

Here you can find information on changes that we’re planning for the next Launchpad release. These are changes that may affect the way you use Launchpad, rather than a full list of new features that will appear in 1.1.10.

Giving us your feedback

We welcome your feedback and invite you to join us on the launchpad-users mailing list.

You can also come and speak directly with the Launchpad team in the Launchpad Users Meeting on Wednesday 10th October at 16.00 UTC.

We’ll publish an updated version of this report on the 17th October.

Launchpad general

• A new “Request information” option will be added to the “Proposed member” page, alongside “Approve” and “Decline”. This will help team administrators to contact prospective members who hide their email addresses. (Bug 66105)
• When someone registers a new project in Launchpad, they will need to specify that project’s licence. (Bug 117276)
• Team membership change notifications will have shorter subject lines. (Bug 144540)

Bug Tracker

• It will be possible to change the status of multiple bugs at once from a bug listing. (Blueprint mass-bug-editing-phase-1 and bug 41702)
• Displaying remote bug comments. (Blueprint displaying-remote-bug-comments)
• Email addresses in bug descriptions will be obfuscated. (Bug 140575)

Code

• The code browse (Loggerhead) pages will have an improved design. (Bug 144744)
• The “user@” portion of ssh code-hosting URLs will be removed and the user identified by their public key. (Bug 137910)
• Editing bug-branch links will be restricted to the branch owner and the project’s bug contact. (Bug 138805)

Soyuz

• Ubuntu releases that are no longer support (Warty, Hoary and Breezy) will be removed from Launchpad’s archive. (Bug 66631)

Further information

You can find full details of what we have planned for Launchpad 1.1.10 at:

https://edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-project/+milestone/1.1.10

The next release of Launchpad is due on the 19th September. As always there’ll be new features, bug fixes and one or two changes to the way some parts of Launchpad work.

I’ll post full details of what’s new on the release day. For now, here are the changes that may affect the way you use Launchpad:

General Launchpad

• Bug 127879: Python examples will no longer be misinterpreted as
  quotes and so won’t be collapsed as quotes.
• Bug 129815: Milestone overview pages will show the total number of bugs and blueprints targeted.

Answers

• Bug 129497: Questions will no longer be automatically expired if they are linked to an open bug.
• Bug 3970: It will be possible to turn a bug report into a question.

Code

• Bug 74031: Mirror branch pages will display the mirroring interval and the time of the next planned mirroring.
• Bug 130883: Imports of Subversion trunks that use a name other than “trunk” will be possible.
• Bug 133983: On the branch home page, the revision number shown in the “Recent revisions” list will be hyperlinked to codebrowse and will show the diff for that revision.
• Bug 133599: The URLs that are shown on the branch index page will show the Bazaar smart server URLs rather than SFTP.
• Bug 43808: It will be possible to make a bug-branch link from the branch page.

Bug tracker

• Bug 4592: If you add a watch of a bug in an external tracker that Launchpad doesn’t already know about, it’s now much easier to give Launchpad the details of that new bug tracker.
• Bug 91925: Unassigned bugs that have the “Incomplete” status for 60 days will automatically be switched to “Invalid” status to help provide cleaner bug search results.
• Bug 126224: Removing an attachment from a bug will also remove the associated comment.

You can go find more about what we have planned on the Launchpad 1.1.9 milestone page.

There’s a lot to Launchpad. Right now, we’ve got: five main applications, 3,397 registered projects, 1172 teams, a staggering 1,121,443 people registered and a heck of a lot of code.

Milestones

To make it easier to manage Launchpad’s development, we release a new version roughly every four weeks. The next release we’re due to make is milestone 1.1.7 on 18 July. Then 1.1.8 comes on 22 August.

You can see what blueprints and bugs are targeted against each part of Launchpad by visiting the milestone links on the Launchpad project overview page.

There’s an easier way, though…

Quick overview of coming features

If you’re not interested in every detail and want to know about only the most interesting or important features, you can take a look at our Coming Features page.

It’s split into each of the main Launchpad applications – Bug Tracker, Code Hosting, Blueprint, Answers and Translations – and gives you a brief overview of what we’ve got planned for the next couple of months

Talk to me

The great thing about the Coming Features page is it’s an easy way to see what changes might affect you. So, let’s take an example:

Frequently asked questions occur in every project. A new feature in the Answer Tracker will help users to find the best answer to a project’s most commonly asked questions. Answer contacts will be able to identify FAQ and provide the canonical answer, meaning that users can get straight to the information they need. FAQ will be searchable in their own right and will also be offered as a possible answer when a user asks a matching question.

If you’re an Answer Contact, the new FAQ feature could have quite an effect on the way you work. If you had concerns or questions, you get to voice them long before the feature is released and in time to have an impact on its implementation.

So, take a look at the Coming Features page, subscribe to it and then email me – feedback@launchpad.net – with you comments, questions and suggestions!

Update: I’ve added a feed for Coming Features at http://news.launchpad.net/category/coming-features/feed