Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week day 4 kicks off and we have some incredible events today: 5pm UTC – Hot rodding your app for translations support – David Planella 6pm UTC – Learning through examples with Acire and Python-Snippets – Jono Bacon 7pm UTC – Write Beautiful Code (and Maintain it Beautifully) – rockstar 8pm UTC – Speed your development [...]

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Recently I announced Project Awesome Opportunity; an ambitious goal to build awesome collaboration facilities into Ubuntu that makes working together on projects as simple as possible. Project Awesome Opportunity is not just about coding: it is about people opportunistically creating things that scratch their itches. This could could anything from software to learning materials and [...]

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Something we have been spending some time working on in this cycle has been fixing the mess that is the system tray. This is based upon an awesome specification submitted to Freedesktop by KDE. The spec has been implemented by KDE, we have written an implementation for the GNOME panel and it shipped in Ubuntu [...]

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Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook have become an increasingly common medium in which people are communicating. While Google Wave vies to be the next generation of communication (as we waxed lyrical about on the recent Shot Of Jaq), in reality email and microblogging are unlikely to be unseated as primary methods of communication. Naturally, we want [...]

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In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010. The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer [...]

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In the continued interests of making Ubuntu a rocking platform for opportunistic developers, today we formulated the plan for Project Awesome Opportunity. The goal is simple: build an opportunistic development workflow into Ubuntu. You will install one package from Universe and your Ubuntu will be hot-rodded for opportunistic application development, making development more fun and [...]

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Something I have talked about extensively recently has been my passion to see opportunistic developers served well on the Linux desktop. These kinds of programmers are people who want to write small, focused, fun little applications that scratch an itch, even if that itch is to have fun. These kinds of developers are having a [...]

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Recently I have been talking about how stoked I am that we are solving the problems in the notification area with Application Indicators based on this spec from the KDE team. We are now shipping this functionality in Lucid with Rhythmbox, Nautilus, Empathy, XChat-GNOME, Lernid and other applications using it. Application developers are pretty excited about [...]

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Something we have been spending some time working on in this cycle has been fixing the mess that is the system tray. This is based upon an awesome specification submitted to Freedesktop by KDE. The spec has been implemented by KDE, we have written an implementation for the GNOME panel and it will ship in [...]

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We are currently looking for two contractors to come and work at Canonical to write some upstream code to help GNOME applications fit into the full Ubuntu desktop experience. This is an awesome opportunity for talented GNOME developers and a a great way to dip your feet into the Ubuntu development team. The roles involve [...]

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I am really excited to see Ted’s post regarding some of the improvements coming to the desktop notification area. This part of our desktop has become something of a wild west – icons look ugly, are spaced too close together, have left/right click inconstancy, often provide obscure and inaccessible widgets and cannot be easily controlled [...]

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Quick update on my icon hacking. I have now figured out a way to get most of my notification icons to have broadly the right color. It used to look like this: Now it looks like this: To do this I first copied my Human icon, edited theme.index to change the name of the theme and then [...]

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For some time now there has been a general move over to darker themes in GNOME-land. I have tried a bunch of themes here and there but I have always moved back to the default Ubuntu theme: I always found the dark theme less usable and harder to look at in my day to day [...]

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I decided recently to give a new mail client a whirl. Evolution, while an excellent client, appears to be a bit clunky with IMAP. I specifically have all of my mail go through GMail, and I access with IMAP. Evolution seems to be a bit slow when doing this. I had heard about the new [...]

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A while back, I read with great interest Vincent’s blog entry. I also heard from my fellow Canonicalites about the progress made the GNOME hackfest. I am rather interested in the opportunities before us with the GNOME platform and a new approach to the shell, so when I read Owen’s update I may have actually [...]

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