jonobacon@home

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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!

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 [...]

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 [...]

When I started out on my Open Source adventure, my desktop looked like this: Today, it looks like this: Wow. That is all.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]