I have always been a fan of helping in any way I can to encourage people to support small organizations and businesses who are doing their best to be successful by working hard and providing a friendly, honest service. For the earlier part of this week I am in The Hague at GUADEC, and I stumbled [...]

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Recently we have been investing in creating an implementation of a panel-based menu that we are planning on shipping with the 10.10 version of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. As with our other projects, this is entirely Open Source and you can download, test and play with it from this page. So far for testing purposes we [...]

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In the Ubuntu 10.10 cycle we have committed to implementing application menus in the Ubuntu Netbook Edition release of Ubuntu. There are many benefits to this approach, but I will you to the design rationale that was announced recently. I personally think this is going to be a tremendously valuable feature and continues to optimize [...]

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Yesterday I started using Evolution instead of Thunderbird 3 in Lucid, and I justed wanted to tell the Evo team that they have done a wonderful job. I stopped using Evo due to performance problems, but many of those issues seem to have gone. I am really enjoying my use of it. I don’t think [...]

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Yesterday, Pete Graner, leader of the Ubuntu Kernel Team asked me a question: Is it possible to route audio from one application into another as an input. As an example, if on a video or audio chat in Empathy, is it possible to route the output of Rhythmbox or Totem into the input for [...]

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Recently I asked for some help on how to download a file without blocking the GUI. Thanks to everyone who contributed their expertise in the post comments: I now have my program working great. I wanted to now share my conclusions so that others can benefit from them too. To do this I am going to [...]

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Slightly technical question for my friends on Planet GNOME. I have been hunting around for some help online with no luck, so I figured I would post here and hopefully this blog entry can be a solution for those who have similar questions. I am in the process of porting App Of Jaq to to async. [...]

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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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