Last week ubermix 1.0 was officially released into the wild, with hundreds of users downloading the image within the first few hours of it being posted. We've been thrilled by your enthusiasm and excited to see ubermix spread to reaches far and wide.
Understandably, a broader base of users leads to the discovery of unexpected issues, and a few important ones have come up that needed to be addressed right away, as follows:
- There was a glitch in the way ubermix was storing wireless connection information that caused the configuration to be tied to the MAC address of the device. The result of this was non-portable wireless settings, which meant that multiple machines imaged off of the same master had to log in again to the wireless. This issue would only affect those who are deploying ubermix off of their own custom images at scale.
- The disk scan option in the startup menu was no longer working in the 1.0 release version. This could be problematic for some, as unexpected shutdowns can, on rare occasions, cause a problem with the directory on the disk, with no easy way to repair it. ubermix does auto-check volumes at startup, however if it runs into a problem that the auto-check can't solve, repairing the disk becomes a much more complicated affair without the scan disk option.
These important issues have been addressed in ubermix 1.01. As a result, we strongly recommend that users of ubermix 1.0 download and install the updated version from http://ubermix.org/files.html
In addition, 1.01 brings an important improvement to the user interface that can significantly improve the experience for novice users. On ubermix 0.9x and earlier, open applications were always visible at the top of the screen (see the "Global Menus" section of my prior post for details), making it easy to tell at-a-glance what programs were already running and switch to them with a click. With the introduction of Global Menus in ubermix 1.0, while we gained valuable screen real estate for applications, we had to sacrifice the quick, "at-a-glance" visibility of open applications, in favor of the less assertive "application switcher" (again see my prior post for details). In theory, this alleviated the problem in an easy-to-use way, however in practice it introduced a bit of a learning curve for novice users, exacerbated by the lack of feedback upon clicking on the icon for an open application in the launcher.
In an effort to ease the learning curve, the launcher in ubermix 1.01 now reliably tracks open windows for applications and automatically brings them to the front when you click on a hidden application in the launcher. Users no longer have to rely on the application switcher to manage open applications. A big "thank you" to Colin Matheson (@cytochromec) at Carmel Unified for holding an early staff development on 1.0 and sharing the experience :-)
Keep the comments coming! You are the most important member of the ubermix development team!
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