The Canonical Launchpad and Bazaar teams were in Dublin last week for their six-monthly meet-up. While there I spoke to Launchpad’s UI guy, Huw, to ask what he’s working on and what’s next for Launchpad’s web interface. Download the ogg vorbis file. …
On Launchpad we have a lot of links that take your focus away from the current task. Usually, these exist to let you get more information on Launchpad or take you off Launchpad to do something like look at upstream information. These links are usually represented one of two …
We’re having a Launchpad meet-up in Dublin next Wednesday (29th June) from 8pm at the Porterhouse on Nassau Street. Come and meet some of the Canonical Launchpad team, a few other Canonical types and members of the Ubuntu Irish LoCo.
We are testing changes to the person picker used on many pages in Launchpad. Our general goal is to ensure that you can trust you know who the user you are seeing is. Beta testers will see two subtle changes to pages: The login status area in the upper right of the page will show …
Yesterday, Jonathan Lange our Product Strategist announced that he was leaving Launchpad after four and a half year. The fact that he’s only leaving next door to work on the Ubuntu Developer Programme from within the Platform team is only a small comfort. Before becoming …
Over the past few months, my team have been working to make it easier to create and manage derivative distributions in Launchpad. Although most of this will be of interest only to distro admins and contributors, we recently released a beta of a new feature that lets you visualize …
Read more of Visualizing Ubuntu Differences Against Debian →
DRY is one of my watchwords. That’s “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, of course. If you’re designing your page to work with-and-without JavaScript enabled, then you’ll likely be tempted to repeat some of the user-interface text in the template and in …
Read more of Using visibility for rudimentary JavaScript templating →
Launchpad has a nice feature for initialising on-page JavaScript, called the JSONCache. I recommend considering it as your first choice when writing JavaScript that needs to be initialised. The one downside is that due to bug #740208, it’s not available for users who …
Read more of Initializing page JavaScript from the JSONCache →
I’m not a developer. I’ve played around — various flavours of BASIC as a kid, Python nowadays — but it rarely goes beyond a little experimentation. Lately, though, my lack of Python-fu has been increasingly frustrating. In particular, there are times when I want to …
I recently came back to JavaScript, having largely ignored it for a couple of years. Development in JavaScript is much nicer than I remember. I thought I should share what I’ve learned. The first thing I’ll mention is YUI tests. If you’re a TDD developer (and if …