Harvest + GSoC week 12

Well, I managed my last-minute merge request for Summer of Code 2010, and with that done it is time for my last GSoC 2010 blog post!

I am really glad I did this. It’s taught me a lot about myself (having never done a project in this fashion before) and I’m happy with how it turned out. GSoC was a nice change of pace and I hope to keep this up for a while!

(Hamster still says I’m a slacker. I need to convince it otherwise)

So, here are the results of some recent tinkering:

First, of course: new font! It requests the delightful UbuntuBeta font first and borrows some conventions from the Ubuntu Web guidelines.
Daniel added help text to the opportunity list filters. He gave each one a tooltip with a nice explanation.
There’s now a permalink for every source package, a nice Edit button for each opportunity, and some other small visual tweaks. Just little stuff like that.

Previously, every opportunity in Harvest had a text box labelled “Comment” that saved to a single database field. The idea was someone could fill it in with useful information for other Harvest users. It felt sort of like Launchpad’s Whiteboard feature in Blueprints.

I decided that implementation would encourage very complex comments. That’s a problem because Harvest aggregates other stuff. There’s a good chance whatever it links to will have its own comment system. I wanted to differentiate Harvest’s comments so they would never be seen as alternatives to whatever is in a referenced bug tracker. Instead, these should be, from top to bottom, specifically for small pointers.

So, we played with it and I added Notes (which is apparently the least commonly implemented synonym of Comments). Notes are little messages you can add to opportunities. Each note is basically a text field limited to 250 characters. No special formatting and no newlines. When I write one, I think of IRC.

The feature isn’t as quick to find as I’d like (there’s an app bug report for that), but it’ll be good to see how people use Harvest before adding more stuff. There are probably all sorts of cool things that could be done, so I’d love to know in the comments here if you have an idea!

(…And I can’t believe I haven’t done this yet)
Thank you to Daniel for being a great mentor! I can confirm the rumours are true: he is an excellent guy. I’ve really enjoyed working with him.

I didn’t quite get to everything I wanted for GSoC (and I have to admit I got carried away with design trivialities this week), but now we’re just a few small pieces away from a spectacular tool for Ubuntu developers. After a bit of a coding / remembering last year’s math course break, I’ll be back helping with some more of those bits. It’s going to be fun!

Here’s a completely unrelated bit of good news: I learned that UDS-N is now short for UDS-Natty, and I miraculously have no exams anywhere near late October ;)
So, assuming I can find a narwhal and convince it I am indeed smart and fashionable, I’m totally hoping to get there, meet people, learn lots of stuff and wax lyrical about Harvest, slideshows and release notes (as I do). Should be fun!