I’d like to thank all the people who sent us feedback during the recent development of mintInstall. We’re still happy to receive ideas and suggestions at this stage, but we’re also getting close to a usable product. Because the number of changes was so great and because I know many of you are interested in running this newer version, I decided to publish DEB packages for this beta of mintInstall.

Here’s how the interface looks:

To install this application, you first need to install a DEB package called “mintinstall-data”, and then another DEB package called “mintinstall”. Both packages can be downloaded at this address:

http://github.com/linuxmint/mintinstall/downloads

Give us your feedback, don’t hesitate to report malfunctions or ideas for further improvements.

This is already the 3rd blog post about mintInstall so we’ll move to something else after that. If we have the time, we might go down the same feedback/dev_iterations process for mintUpdate.

To tell you the truth, I had plans to work on the OEM installation and on mintBackup at this stage of the release cycle (I’m still hoping to work on these before the release of Mint 8). I thought I was done with mintInstall and I was quite happy with the improvements made so far. But the feedback I got from my initial post was good, constructive and I just couldn’t ignore it.

So I decided to make the jump and to give mintInstall the ability to install multiple applications at a time. There’s also going to be a “View” menu with the ability to choose the visible columns, and I’m also planning to make changes in the application view, but the main thing here, is the fact that you can now see what’s installed, and click apply after a series of additions/removals. The GUI is dramatically changed because of this.

So here it is:

As you can see, the little colored squares indicate the status of the application. They tend to follow the aptitude classification (“i” for installed, “p” for available). Because of the nature of the Mint files, some rare ones are “special”, which means that when you install/remove them, the change is done immediately, not when you click apply.

I’m happy with the overall look but I’m aware of the fact that certain elements can be confusing, so I’m asking for feedback once again and hopefully with your bright ideas we won’t only get these great features, but also an intuitive and elegant interface to go with it.