Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Evolution Testing + Compiz Cube Caps

This last week, I have been busy doing QA work on Evolution 2.24 with the Groupwise backend and submitting all of the issues to Novell. Sankar shipped me a patch late yesterday that allows me to widen my beta testing to more employees. Looks like we will be merging in a lot more calendar functionality which will be greatly appreciated by our users. Each upgrade gets us closer and closer to feature parity to the Groupwise client, which is excellent.

When I was teaching Compiz classes to other employees it was an often requested feature to put other images on th top of the cube caps. This is another example of something too hard for most users with the ccsm interface because it assumes:

- They know what size to create the image
- They know what file format to create, and don't just change the file extension
- They know how to work with transparent layers in GIMP
- They know where to save the file.
- They know where to find the file later.
- They know how to give it permissions that other users can use as well
- They know not to delete it, because it's already been "attached" (ala email).

I went through and generated 10 pre-defined caps with color matched sky domes and then created a very simple custom GUI. All they have to do is push a button and click [ OK] and everything is taken care of for them. 4 of our departments have their logos, and it's little things like this that generate excitement about using Linux.

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