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Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category


Posted on August 25, 2010 - by jono

Rocking The Application Indicators

Some time back the Ayatana project introduced the Application Indicator Framework, based upon technology created by the KDE project. We have been shipping this technology in Ubuntu for a few releases now and it makes the top-right part of the desktop a smooth, efficient, and pleasant experience, getting over the inconsistent and limiting notification area we had before.

To help build integration in the GNOME panel for this indicator work we had Ted Gould, Cody Somerville, and Jason Smith produce an implementation complete with C, Python and C# bindings, had Aurélien Gâteau continue to perform his excellent work with KDE, and Jorge Castro to help spread awareness of this work. In addition to this we contracted some developers to port apps with notification indicators that we ship in Ubuntu to the new framework, and this included apps such as Brasero, GNOME Bluetooth, GNOME Power Manager, Gnome Settings Daemon, XChat-GNOME, iBus, Nautilus, Policykit GNOME, Empathy, Gwibber and more. All of these patches are publicly available if other distros would like to use them.

The community has really got involved with the technology too, with community patches for Lernid, Banshee, LottaNZB, and DejaDup, and System Monitor, Weather, Screenshotting, Workspaces, Device Mounting indicators, support for the indicator framework built into AWN and Lubuntu, and more. I am absolutely delighted to see so much interest from application developers in the technology.


Posted on July 30, 2010 - by jono

Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions

Earlier this week at GUADEC, the always affable Dave Neary presented his GNOME Census work. Unfortunately, I was not there to see it, but I read his excellent post on the topic.

One of the reactions from the survey was that Red Hat are responsible for 16% of the contributions to GNOME whereas Canonical are responsible for a measly 1%.

Of course, this has generated some flame, such as a particularly angry post from Greg DeKoenigsberg and the rather pithy response from Jeffrey Stedfast. Greg is clearly pissed, and Jeffrey is clearly pissed at Greg being pissed, and I suspect Greg is going to get even more pissed at Jeffrey being pissed. The worse thing is that they are both going to be pissed at me for this blog post.

First I want to put these figures in perspective and then I want to talk about how we read the figures we do have.

I think the GNOME Census report is excellent, and it provides some excellent visibility into contributions in GNOME, but it only takes into account upstream contributions to GNOME itself. What the report doesn’t take into account are upstream contributions that are built on the GNOME platform but (a) not part of official GNOME modules, and (b) hosted and developed elsewhere, such as Launchpad. As such, while the report is accurate for showing code and contributions accepted into GNOME, there are also many projects built on GNOME technology that are not taken into account due to non-inclusion in GNOME modules or being developed outside of GNOME infrastructure.

As a general rule, Canonical staff develop inside Launchpad. The reason is simple; Launchpad and Bazaar provide a powerful development environment that was also built by Canonical and we therefore have lots of internal skills and best practice based on these tools. Launchpad is also a fundamental component in Ubuntu development and all the software we develop ultimately ships in Ubuntu, so using the same development forge makes sense. Finally, the site is a Free Software and Open Source project, so there really no philosophical reason to move, testified by the 18,000+ Free Software projects happily using Launchpad already.

Canonical is actively developing upstream desktop software, but doing it in Launchpad. Some examples include:

This is by no means the full list, and is other work such as Simple Scan, the Hardware Drivers tool, Computer Janitor, and more. Many of these contributions (such as Application Indicators and Simple Scan) could bring real value to GNOME, but they have not been accepted. I know that the Canonical engineers who work on them would be delighted if they were included in GNOME.

The above list also doesn’t include significant upstream investment in other areas such as Upstart, Bazaar, Launchpad, and a full team building Ubuntu. I don’t want to turn this into a “who contributed more” competition, but I think for some to suggest Canonical is a bad citizen who is not contributing upstream code is unreasonable. To suggest that Canonical has limited code inside approved GNOME modules is fair.

So that was the first thing I wanted to clarify; Canonical does invest heavily in upstream work, but GNOME is not the only home for upstream contributions.

If there is one thing that the GNOME Census has really outlined is that we should all be proud of Red Hat and their contributions to GNOME. You only have to take a look at all the red items on this image to get a feeling for the wonderful work that Red Hat is doing inside GNOME. Novell too. Look the green items in there; Novell has done a wonderful job maintaining many modules inside GNOME. In fact, there are many companies investing inside GNOME modules and inside GNOME infrastructure. I don’t believe it would be fair to undermine these contributions in any way; they are testament to the ethos of those companies and their commitment to GNOME. All of the people working at those companies are doing good work within the spirit of Free Software.

Likewise, I don’t think it is fair to undermine Canonical’s contributions just because many of them exist outside of GNOME. Our engineers are also doing good work within the spirit of Free Software. I have never claimed for a second that Canonical are equal to Red Hat and Novell in terms of our accepted contributions in GNOME; it is clear that there are far few contributions from Canonical staff inside accepted GNOME modules, but this does not for a second mean that Canonical is not (a) producing upstream contributions and (b) heavily invested in the GNOME platform. Ubuntu, our primary product is a GNOME desktop, and the vast majority of our engineers are GNOME users and developers and they work every day on a GNOME based product.

So in a nutshell, this is my take: both Red Hat and Canonical invest heavily in Open Source development, but they do it in different ways and different places. The GNOME Census clearly outlines that within GNOME modules, Red Hat are doing far more, but that doesn’t mean that Canonical are sitting on their thumbs and doing nothing, far from it.


Posted on July 27, 2010 - by jono

Awesome GUADEC Espresso and Coffee Bar

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 across a small espresso shop that is the embodiment of these kinds of small business. It is impeccably clean, the food is awesome, the coffee is fantastic, it is good value, and the guy who runs the shop is the definition of kind and welcoming. Oh, and it has great wi-fi too. :-)

So, I wanted to share with all my friends who are visiting GUADEC too to come and support this guy’s small business, drink some coffee and leach his Internet. :-)

The address is: 7 o’clock Espressobar, Wagenstraat 187 2512 AW Den Haag and if you are walking back to the hotel before you walk over the small bridge you will see it on the left with a big Coca-Cola sign above it.

More details on the website.


Posted on July 13, 2010 - by jono

Sound Indicator

I am totally digging the sound menu that is shipping in the development branch of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:

It feels well designed, implemented and sleek. Great work mpt and Conor!


Posted on July 8, 2010 - by jono

Indicator Panel Menu Rocks The House

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 have been leaving on the in-application menu, but yesterday I switched it off to get the full experience. To do this I edited /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu to set APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH=0. I was aware of the design justification of having a single menu; it is easier for users to find it due to it’s consistent place, and particularly for netbooks, it saves on significant screen-real estate use. Now I can absolutely see and feel the benefits; I am loving having the menu there and my desktop feels sleeker and more consistent.

Of course, there is much to be fixed — such as the fact that GIMP crashes the menu — but most apps are working great and while this is not designed or scoped for the desktop, I think I might just leave it on. :-)

What’s more, an added benefit of this implementation (and using the dbus-menu approach) is that KDE applications running in GNOME have their menu’s rendered as GTK widgets (and vice versa), helping to integrate GNOME and KDE apps better. Right now the in-app menus are still visible, but the following screenshot shows K3B’s menus rendered as GTK menus:

Awesome! :-)

I just want to offer some kudos to Cody Russell for writing the menu, Aurélien Gâteau for his awesome work in ensuring all of this works with KDE, Jorge Castro for coordinating much of the testing, and for our awesome community of testers and bug reporters for helping to bang it into shape. You are going to help really make Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 really rock, and of course anyone who chooses to use it on their desktop.

Go and find out more and play with it yourself here.


Posted on May 28, 2010 - by jono

Testing Indicator Application Menu Support

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 Ubuntu for screen real-estate.

To satisfy this feature, the Desktop Experience team have produced an implementation called indicator-appmenu which has been worked on by the always awesome Cody Russell and Ted Gould. The implementation essentially re-routes application menus over dbusmenu so that they can appear in the panel; the technology is based on the same technology that drives the application indicator framework. Aside from the design rationale benefits, the implementation also supports GTK and Qt menus out of the box and will render Qt menus in GNOME with GTK widgets and vice versa. All in all I think it is hugely exciting work.

For the majority of applications that use standard menu widgets, applications should just work out of the box. We are though keen to test as many applications as possible to ensure they work and identify problem spots. Like the last cycle, this new code has been released very early for testing and improvements, and we are keen to have as many folks test, file bugs and where possible file patches to fixes.

To make this as simple as possible, this page explains how to download, test and provide feedback. Importantly, you don’t have to be running Ubuntu Netbook Edition to test – you can use the normal Ubuntu desktop edition!. Packages are already available in a PPA for Lucid and we have listed all of the apps that could do with some testing. We have also includes instructions for how to file bugs for apps that have issues; this will make it easier to produce fixes. One important note: up until alpha 2 we are deliberately leaving the menus switched on in both the application and in the panel – this provides a great way to compare and contrast the normal app menu with the panel menu to ensure they are the same.

Thanks to everyone who participates in the testing; this is sure to make the Ubuntu Netbook Edition rock even harder. :-)

To get started testing, click here!


Posted on April 22, 2010 - by jono

Change I Can Believe In

When I started out on my Open Source adventure, my desktop looked like this:

Today, it looks like this:

Wow.

That is all.


Posted on April 8, 2010 - by jono

PyJunior: Call For Documentation Help!

Just a quick note: the PyJunior code is up on Launchpad. Please remember: I wrote this in about two hours and haven’t had any time to clean it up. So, expect warts and all. :-)

The Open Sourcerer pointed me at Snake Wrangling for Kids as a great kid-friendly guide for learning Python. My dream now is that when a kid clicks the big Help button in PyJunior, that the book pops up in native GNOME help format. Problem is: I have absolutely no idea how to convert Snake Wrangling for Kids (which is available in LaTeX and PDF format) into this help format, and don’t really have any time to contribute to this either.

So, I am looking for help. PyJunior provides a simple and effective of way of playing with Python for kids, but we really need the documentation to make this story rock. Is there anyone out there who would like to work on this and make clicking that Help button a fantastic experience for kids interested in learning programming? I really hope so: this could be a wonderful learning tool for ankle-biters everywhere. :-)

If you are interested in helping, do let me know in the comments on this blog entry and we can talk more. If you just want to crack on and make the docs love happen, do feel free to go ahead and submit a merge proposal when you have something.

To do those who help, thanks so much in advance! :-)


Posted on April 2, 2010 - by jono

Thanks Evolution Developers

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 the Evo team get enough credit for their incredible and hard work on it, so I just wanted to share some public kudos. Thanks, folks!


Posted on April 2, 2010 - by jono

Audio Connections In Gnome

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 Empathy so the person you are talking to can hear the music?

I had no idea, but I said I would blog it on Planet GNOME to see if this exists. And so, here is my blog. Thoughts?