Tuesday, April 3, 2007

New Launchpad UI

Just a quick mention of a new update to Launchpad.
The user interface has gone through a bit of an overhaul. Pages have been streamlined and unified by operation (overview, code, bugs, etc).

Some things are just glitter, but there is also some real meat to the update.

One piece of glitter is that the individual pages can have some custom branding of icons. For example, the bzr or jokosher pages have custom icons. Which stay with you when you go to the 'bugs' page, or the 'code' page. It is a small thing, but I think it does help you keep track of where you are at.

One more bit of useful bling is in the bug listing. If you see the Bazaar "merge" icon next to a bug, it means there is a Bazaar branch associated with it. So you can see what bugs someone is actively working on. And it gives people an easy way to get the potential bugfix, or possibly just subscribe to the bug (and/or branch changes) to follow along with how it is being fixed.

This tidbit is also shown in reverse on the branch listing. So when you are looking at the list of branches, you can see ones that are associated with bugs, and quickly jump to the bugs that they are addressing.

Overall, I'm happy to see the new design, and I think the Launchpad developers deserve a many kudos!