jonobacon@home

This is a personal post and does not neccessarily represent the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu community. Today Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation wrote a critical post accusing Ubuntu of shipping spyware (which is referring to the online search capabilities of the Ubuntu dash). He goes on to [...]

Search is at the heart of Ubuntu. Whether you search for applications or content in the dash, search for functionality in your applications the HUD, or search within applications and your file manager, for Ubuntu to be successful we have to get search right. As we build search more and more into Ubuntu, it becomes [...]

Last week Benjamin Otte shared some thoughts about GNOME that were pretty stark. It gathered some steam and hit Slashdot and this all happened the week GUADEC was taking place in A Coruña. I wasn’t at GUADEC but I can imagine there was some fervent discussion about the blog entry. The gist of Benjamin’s blog [...]

Last night I posted a call for a web designer to help design the accomplishment information inside the app. Fortunately, Brandon Holtsclaw responded and sent over some CSS and HTML that was ready for me when I woke up. It now looks like this: Shiny! Thanks to Brandon for this work! I also really liked [...]

I just wanted to offer my thanks to the LibreOffice team for their continued efforts in slimming down, refining, and bringing new features to the office suite. People sometimes talk a bit of smack about LibreOffice, but the team has been doing a great job in not only liberating the codebase from an unhealthy previous [...]

I spent some more time this weekend hacking on the Ubuntu Accomplishments spec I blogged about recently. I just wanted to provide a little more eye-candy of some of the progress. When you load the app it shows you a list of the available opportunities you can achieve: (obviously a bunch of these are dummy [...]

I am a pretty terrible programmer. Anyone who has read my code can see that. Unfortunately, I tend to have lots of ideas about how we can use technology in different ways, hence why I write some code. Examples of this have included Lernid, Acire, RaccoonShow, and Jokosher. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view), [...]

A little while back I blogged about an accomplishments system that Stuart Langridge and I designed when he came to visit a while back. The idea was simple: a de-centralized system in which we can easily define different types of accomplishments (e.g. filing a bug, submitting a patch, getting a patch sponsored, translating a string) [...]

Like many of you I get a lot of email, and like many of you I often struggle to keep up with it in the context of everything else that is going on. Recently I have been trying a few little experiments in adjusting my email workflow to see if I can be more productive. [...]

So here we are in the thick of the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot development cycle, and I am really excited about the progress that is being made. I thought it could be interesting to show off some of the work that is going on with a quick screenshot tour. This cycle has been very much [...]