Brilliant Brainstorms is 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.

First, I have been eagerly watching the Brainstorm Blog, but there have really not been any new posts in a long time. I hope this changes soon.

Now on to the ideas. Starting with the small ones.

If you have ever downloaded a lot of wallpapers to try out, you know that adding them all manually can be a little annoying, so why not just have a folder that Ubuntu automatically watches?

Sometimes applications have weird, err… creative, name which can be confusing. Instead of forcing everyone to use dull names, just add what the application does at the end.

This is more of an advanced feature, but it would be nice for some people to know why they can’t use Compiz, not just that it does not work on their PC. As long as it is hidden behind an advanced button, there is no reason not to include this.

More organization is always better, so the more small tools to help people organize their folders and files the better.

Another organization tool, being able to name drives and partitions. Sick of remembering the size of each HD you use AND what it is for? Vote for this idea.

You may know that this is a bit of a rip off from Vista Ultimate, but, while I am usually against simply copying a feature like this, two things make me feel differently about this. First, in my experience, all you would have to do in order to implement this better than Vista did is make it not freeze after extended use. Second, Ubuntu can do better than Vista by offering more than just video. Perhaps sideshows of your photos/photos from friends streamed from the internet or a Fedora-like background that changes based on the time of day?

For a new user trying to install Flash from the Adobe website, it is very hard. If Adobe just included a .deb package, it would be soooo much easier.

And finally, the big idea. People are already using Ubuntu Brainstorm to add their ideas for other open-source projects, so there is clearly a need for more projects to implement a Brainstorm-like site. Instead of making all those projects, some of them possibly very small, make and maintain their own site, there could be one site for ideas for all open-source projects. It could even be part of Launchpad.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Brainstorms, 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.