UbiquitySlideshow specification Wiki page shock and horror

[Evan Dandrea]

I started to integrate ubiquity-slideshow into ubiquity.  I originally
moved the progress bar into the main window, only to realize that we
do not want any of the UI from the main window.  The back, forward,
and quit buttons are unnecessary once the install has started and the
heading is redundant.  We want to give the maximum amount of space to
the slideshow itself, so I think it makes sense to keep the progress
bar where it is, in a separate window.  Working with that, I came up
with the following working, but untranslated, example:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~evand/tmp/slideshow-sample.png

I showed this to Matthew Paul Thomas, and he suggested that we get rid
of the expander and just use a frame, which I've fixed in my local
branch.  He then pointed me at the following discussion he had with
someone that apparently approached the ubiquity-slideshow list with
his ideas for the project:
(04:49:11 PM) mpt:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2009-June/002124.html
(second half)
(04:49:17 PM) mpt: and
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2009-July/002165.html

I think the assumption that WebKit is too much overhead is incorrect,
as we've discussed here before.  As mentioned, we should be getting
WebKitGtk as part of the Gwibber MIR
(https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-karmic-social-from-the-start).

That said, Matthew thinks the slides could use some improvement.
Specifically he mentioned that there be "one illustration per slide,
no strong border around it, no text inside it, separate localizable
text floating around the illustration" and to "fade over ~2 seconds
from one slide to the next."  I asked him if he would be willing to
create a mock up based off of his ideas, and he will try, but he's
understandably very busy with App Center work, so we shouldn't block
on him completing that.

I've tried to touch base with Gerry, but he's on vacation until the 23rd.

One thing that caught my eye in the current ubiquity-slideshow code is
that it creates a template and po files for each page.  Couldn't we
merge this into a single template and po files based off that
template?  As I understand it, this would avoid creating duplicated
strings in the translations.  I played with this a bit and the
following seems to work:
html2po -P slides -o po --duplicates merge; msgcat po/*.po >
po/ubiquity-slideshow.pot
But I'm having difficulty generating translated HTML files from that.
Dylan, or anyone else that's interested, would you mind looking into
this?  I'm afraid my gettext-fu is lacking.

Continuing on that, how do you propose we handle sourcing translated
html files, when they exist?  It should fall back to the html files
for the C locale in the event of only some of the pages being
translated.

I think it makes sense to keep this in its own source tree with its
own binary package as it does not need to depend on anything in the
ubiquity tree, as you have it.  Ubiquity should just create a
webkit.WebView pointed at
/usr/share/ubiquity-slideshow/$LANG/slideshow.html.