Ubiquity Slideshow for Ubuntu

[Dylan McCall]

Hi everybody!


I've been helping with a slideshow that will be shown while Ubuntu
installs (with a modification to Ubiquity). The goal is to throw this
into Karmic, which means by the LTS it will hopefully have received
enough localization and polishing love to make lots of people happy. I
think the actual content has reached a point of reasonable maturity,
where things are looking solid but I still get the feeling that it isn't
perfect.

First of all, a bit more background, because I love background:
I think this is more of a documentation matter than it is an art one. My
ideal thought for the slideshow is something that captures the user's
imagination and shows him around Ubuntu, subtly explaining all the
tricks on the road to using this operating system really well and
leading him to try things on his own. With this, one of the most
important goals I have is to put AN END to those frequent, recurring
'new user problems' that we all cringe at the sight of but can't really
blame the person for because it really isn't that obvious and because
we're meant to be nice :)

My favourite examples are software installation, font changing / other
customization and workspaces. There is also so much great software in
the repositories that some people just don't notice.

Unfortunately, some of my favourite examples have no solutions at the
moment, since we have a fairly stiff limit on how many slides is sane
and have currently met it. (Thanks to Andrew for pointing that one out;
This thing would probably consume six DVDs by now if he hadn't :P).
Still, this does solve a lot of them! The rest is nicely resolved if we
examine what is actually needed and what isn't and make the text nice to
read; that kind of fun stuff.

This all leads to something simple: Well, you guys are the documentation
people! If I want this to serve as good documentation, I should ask what
you all think of it. So, feel free to send any input whatsoever and to
tinker with the content yourself if you feel like it. The slides are
basic HTML (in its simplest form), so don't worry.

Think of this as prominent documentation that we can be confident the
user will see.

It is also The Chance to show our users how lovable Ubuntu is and how
inviting the community is :)



The technical stuff:

Sort of the top layer of this is at
http://launchpad.net/~ubiquity-slideshow
Feel free to head over there and look around. Not a whole lot to see,
but it's there.

The slideshow I am talking about is at
http://edge.launchpad.net/ubiquity-slideshow-ubuntu
Check out the Code section there for where you can download the latest
version of this and play with it.
I will be uploading a snapshot that'll appear under Downloads soon!

To run the slideshow, just open up (in the repository)
slides/Slideshow.html. If you feel the transitions are too quick (eg:
You actually want to read stuff, which I didn't when I was testing it)
you can either open the slides independently (in which case they won't
look pretty) or you can edit Slideshow.html and change the interval
variable in the Crossfade.setup command. I'll be making that reasonably
variable big for the snapshot.

The Readme file has lots of information and most other infrastructure
related files are documented.



Looking forward to your thoughts,

Dylan McCall
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