The Source

The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate Idea #25801: Help the user understand when closing a window does not terminate the app. In other words, figure out to signal to the user that an application will

I conducted 5 qualitative interviews with developers and here are some findings. You have two problems. The first problem is to design the API. The second is to help people learn to use it. Great API design Is consistent, predictable, learnable. You are creating an API that developers will interact with. In the same way

Please join Canonical and Centrify on Thursday, 2 December 2010 at 9 a.m. PST to learn how organizations are enabling the broader deployment of Ubuntu by integrating it into their existing Active Directory infrastructure and management processes. By using Centrify’s Canonical-certified solution, they can go beyond simply offering transpar

New interface significantly eases feature deployment for systems management tool Canonical today announced a free trial to showcase the entirely new interface for its systems management solution, Ubuntu Advantage: Landscape. Landscape has been available to Ubuntu users for four years and is now part of the Ubuntu Advantage service from Ca

Are you a developer or systems administrator that uses Ubuntu at work and/or at home?We’re looking for people who might be available to help us on a current research project in London on the 3rd and 10th December. If this sounds like you please get in touch.

Papercuts Natty cycle depends on you!What’s new this cycle and How you can get involved.

Announcing an all new team focused on fixing bugs, Papercuts Ninja team, and why you should be excited!

You won’t be surprised to hear that I am on the Papercutters team and, in that capacity, was on the receiving end of an email from Vish who points out a couple of things: 1) Only a handful of members in the Papercutters team are active on the project. 2) For a project to live

In contrast to a proportionally spaced font a the characters in a monospace occupy all exactly the same width. In the past monospace type was used on typewriters, and more recently in some specialised printing environments such as Credit Card embossing, or ticketing. Today, monospace fonts are primarily used within a programming environme

In preparation for UDS, we conducted usability testing of Unity with general public users.  We are now better informed as to where we should expend further efforts to enhance the experience for users working with Unity. I summarize my findings below. Participants Selection We asked an external recruiting firm to find 15 participants who a

The theme of this week’s update is one of cool stuff that we came across this week in the world of open source. You’ll know from Christian’s blog post a while ago that we’re really interested in the idea of interacting with your computer physically. Christian experimented with the webcam in a laptop but imagine

India-based government information and communication technologies (ICT) provider The Assam Electronics Development Corporation (AMTRON) needed to provide every Assam student who achieved 60 per cent or higher in their school leaving exams with a free PC. AMTRON needed to comply with strict budgets to deliver reliable, easy-to-use PCs to t

Summary La Gendarmerie Nationale's IT team must ensure that the police force can provide a responsive and cost-effective service nationwide. With growing IT infrastructure costs, the organisation decided to review its existing Microsoft based environment. After switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org and Internet Explorer to Fir

Ubuntu 10.10 launch in October drew strong partner interest Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today the signing of several significant partnerships following the release last month of Ubuntu 10.10. Boxed Ice, Opsview, Riptano, Unoware, Vladster, Wavemaker and Zend all joined as Canonical Software Partners, their appli

Please join IBM and Canonical on Tuesday, 16 November 2010 at 9:00am PDT / 12:00noon EDT / 15:00pm GMT to hear how the combination of IBM and Canonical technologies help organizations build or expand a data centre operating environment that IT staff can rely on and quickly incorporate for significantly lower cost than competing alternativ

We’re back! Phew! What a fortnight! Did you miss us? We all got back from Orlando, Florida this week and prepared to kick off the Natty development cycle in style. UDS-N was a great event and big thanks should go to Jono, Jorge, the Canonical admin and technical teams and everyone who attended sessions, took