Brilliant Brainstorms will be a weekly-ish summary of some of the best brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. In the beginning it may not always come exactly once a week or on the same day, but, if it becomes popular, it should become more regular.

With the increasing popularity of free web mail, more and more people are bound to be looking for a way to get their web mail on their computer. If you look at my tutorial on using GMail with Evolution, you can tell just how difficult it would be for a new user to figure out how to get their web mail on their PC. If GMail, Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc. were an option in Evolution (the GNOME default email program,) it would make it so much easier for new users.

The idea behind Ubuntu Brainstorm is to get ideas and suggestions from Ubuntu users, but in order to expect feedback from users, developers must show how they are using that feedback. Both of these ideas provide methods for users to see what is going on behind the scenes, without having to look at the source code :-).

Although the example files could be much worse, they could also be much better. Showing off impressive formatting in office files and high-quality videos promoting Ubuntu (there are plenty user made Ubuntu ads) could make a good impression on a new user.

Although the reliability of SMART seems to be in question, as far as I am concerned, any chance of warning a user before a crash should not be ignored.

This is almost more of a bug-fix than an idea, but currently when you put in a disk that was not removed properly you get a big scary error message that directs you to execute a command in the terminal. Come on. Windows users often don’t bother to unmount their drives at all, they just pull.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Brainstorms, Development, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.