jonobacon@home

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 [...]

This week has been a big week for Lernid in which it has received some comprehensive testing, feedback and exposure because of the always awesome Ubuntu Developer Week. It has been fantastic to see Ubuntu Developer Week session leaders using slides and the features in Lernid to get the most out of their sessions. Lernid [...]

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 [...]

This week the always awesome Ubuntu Developer Week starts! I am hugely excited about this week, and I can’t wait to see the many fantastic sessions that will be taking place. Connecting to Ubuntu Developer Week has never been easier, with Lernid. Just in time for Ubuntu Developer Week I have rolled out a new [...]

Just a quick note to offer my congratulations to the always affable Amber Graner for her appointment as leader of the Ubuntu Women project. All of the candidates (Melissa Draper, Penelope Stowe and Amber) did a wonderful job in articulating their vision for the project and engaging in the leadership process that we fleshed out [...]

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 [...]

We are currently looking for two paid home-based contractor positions in Europe or the USA 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 [...]

Shot Of Jaq is a ten minute, twice-weekly technology and Open Source podcast that is specifically designed to be the start of the conversation. We have taken care to build an environment optimized around conversation and discussion, and the Shot Of Jaq community is growing at a rate of knots. I just wanted to provide [...]

As I have blogged about recently, I have been really getting into the idea of enabling opportunistic developers to get to grips with writing applications for the Open Source desktop as easily as possible. This has including raving about the awesome Quickly and I recently wrote Acire, a simple program for viewing a library of [...]

I am pleased to announce the second release of my little project to browse, read, run and learn from a library of Python examples. This release brings us: Examples now have syntax highlighting and use a better font for reading code. An awesome new icon designed by the ever-affable Martin Owens. Various bug fixes. You [...]