News, tips and features on the Unity desktop environment, the default shell in Ubuntu.
Canonical plans for Ubuntu to go multi-device, appearing on smartphones, tablets, TVs in addition to the regular ol' PC, aren't due to sneak out until Ubuntu 14.04. But Ubuntu user Ian Santopietro thinks you can't ever be 'too early' to start thinking about how the interface might look, and so presented his take on a multi-device Ubuntu's Unity interface to the 'Ayatana' mailing list.
Unity's Application Lens is pretty much perfect: you can search apps by text, or by category. Simple stuff, right? Well it's not simple enough for those who prefer the more traditional approach to application-menu structure. To that end the maintainer of the Unity Application Lens, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen, has put together an GNOME Menu inspired alternative. A lens he's called 'Unity Bliss'.
Every 3 months Canonical conduct 'benchmark testing' of Unity, to ensure that the design decisions being made are improving user experience and not hampering. In a UDS session presenting the results of recent testing, some surprising results emerged - and most of it countering the negative perception many assume Unity has in the eyes of the target mind.
Ever since Ubuntu 11.04, the lack of the ability to configure many aspects of the new Unity interface has been pointed out and questioned widely. Today, at the “Meet Ubuntu Desktop Designers” session in the […]
As UDS continues over in Florida, USA thoughts have turned on how to make integration between applications and the Unity desktop better.
Kettle's on! Pizza's in the oven! Only 23 minutes until a new episode of Inspector Spacetime - all are situations where keeping an eye on the time is important. Now hopefully you're not like me (i.e. useless at doing so) but, should you be, then TeaTime is a neat Unity-launcher based alarm applet that works wonders.
Browsing your movie files could soon become a lot easier in Ubuntu. A new 'Movie scope' in development for Ubuntu's Unity File Lens aims to enhance browsing your locally available video files by adding searchable movie-related meta-data.
After Oneiric's release last week I had the chance to sit down with Neil Patel, Unity's Technical Lead, to talk about how he felt the Oneiric cycle went and to get his thoughts on Precise Pangolin 12.04. Neil has been working for Canonical for a couple of years, and was previously heavily involved in the original Netbook Remix Launcher which was superseded by Unity originally in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10. As the Technical Lead for Unity, he oversees a lot of the development on the new shell for Ubuntu. Neil is the guy you go to with your questions about the development of Unity, and that's exactly what we did when I sat down for an interview with him last week. Make the jump for the full interview.
Sometimes applications crashes, freeze or otherwise develop an appetite for every last byte of system resources. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. When an application 'crashes' it usually doesn't require any input from you (other than banging your head against the wall at any unsaved work now lost). But applications that decide to 'hang' or 'freeze' not only get in the way of you carrying on with whatever you were doing but can often max out your system resources - leaving you with no option but to reboot or nose-dive into the command line. That's where FlashFreeze by Sergey 'shnatsel' Davidoff is of use.
Evernote – it’s one of the most widely used note taking/to do applications around, yet it still lacks an official Ubuntu client. We’ve covered Evernote clone ‘Nevernote‘ previously, but if you’re seeking something less full-blown […]
Long-time users of Ubuntu might recall that a handy 'Force Quit' applet was once available to add to the desktop panel, which made 'closing' misbehaving applications a cinch. Thankfully for the lazy amongst us reader Josh Leverette has put together a script that adds a 'Force Close' button to the Unity Launcher. With one click you can once again kill crashy, CPU-hogging applications without having to reboot or revert to the Terminal.
A bunch of bug fixes and minor tweaks to Unity in Ubuntu 11.10 slid down the update pipe yesterday - but what exactly has changed? Read on in for a handful of notable highlights...
Last week saw the first Linux release of 'To Do' application Wunderlist. Whilst the release was more than welcomed by Linux users, the inability to install it - and then access it - as simply as a typical Ubuntu package put many potential users off. The following how-to aims to rectify that by making Wunderlist easily searchable and launchable via the Unity Dash.
This is a guest post from Ahmed Kamal and Jorge O. Castro, who will be posting Unity updates over the coming weeks (Original Post) The roll up to Beta two begins as the archive starts […]
With the Ubuntu 11.10 User Interface and Beta freeze happening on the same day it was inevitable that a lot of updates would be firing out of the update canon thick and fast. Rather than bore you with too much exposition why don't we dive right on in and take a gander and some of the most notable changes Ubuntu 11.10 is snow sporting...
Ubuntu hit feature freeze last week, which means for most intents and purposes the features for 11.10 and are now in place, and the remainder of the cycle is left for bug fixing and polish, as you can see the contributor team has been quite busy!
My favourite 'app' of the moment is Unity Mail - a small Unity Launcher-based app that tells you how many unread messages you have in your GMail inbox.
Does Unity Launcher integration for Totem sound helpful? If so then you're in luck...