It is important that Ubuntu is polished up to the little details. You are encouraged to add more cases or improve existent ones!

Some cases that can be improved

Applications menu

• Highlight recently installed applications

Places menu

Removable Media

attachment:places2.png attachment:removablemedia2.png

Added buttons to eject/unmount the media easily.

These buttons should unlatch or open the physical media device. In the same breath, when the button on the CD/DVD player gets pushed, the OS should automatically unmount the device and eject the media. In other words, it needs to "just work."

Bookmarks

Before:

attachment:bookmarks1.png attachment:bookmarks2.png

After:

attachment:bookmarks3.png

This menu shows now the 3 most used bookmarks and hides the rest under a submenu (instead of hiding all of them).

CD/DVD Creator

attachment:cdcreator2.png

Added the "Clear" button. There should be also a message instructing the user and maybe a progress bar with the space occupied.

• Response: Good idea! I started work on this: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520414

Same icons in all places

attachment:consistent-icons.png attachment:consistent-icons2.png

When the user changes the default icon of a folder (like shown in the first image), this change should be reflected under the Places menu (like shown in the second image). This behaviour is now inexistent.

Nautilus

Nautilus keyboard navigation

Some people would like to think of a 2d grid of icons as "perhaps a 1d line" of icons. Thus, pressing right arrow in the last column should move selection, as the red line shows. In reverse, pressing the left arrow in the first column should move to last column in the previous line. This leads the selection order to follow the sort order -- in other words, if the files are ordered alphabetically, selecting the first and last "A" entries with a normal click and a shift-click cause all entries starting with "A" to be selected, no matter which column each falls on.

[http://launchpadlibrarian.net/11627060/keyboard-navigation-expected.png]

This model is used in Windows (all versions), Thunar from XFCE and - AFAIR - MacOS and KDE. It's one of the [http://chabada.sk/better-desktop/ 40+ Suggestions for Better Desktop].

Other people, however, would prefer to think of a 2d grid of icons as 2d, with no wrapping as above. The catch is how to move the selected item after random files have been deleted/moved from the folder.

There should be an option to select this behavior.

• Response: What difference does it make to the keyboard navigation? The key point is to enable arrows at the extreme columns, which should do no harm to anybody.

Intelligent trash-bin

• Add an option to auto-purge elements older than X days

Context-sensitive emblems

• Nautilus should auto-detect the most common type of files inside a folder and attach an emblem accordingly (this feature is available in Konqueror)

Misc

• When opening a file for which only root has write permissions, the user should be prompted for the password to enable writing to it. The user would of course have the option to supply no password, in which case the file will remain read-only. Similarly, if only root has read permissions, the user is notified and offered a password prompt to allow them to read the file.