News, tips and features on the Unity desktop environment, the default shell in Ubuntu.
This is the Unity weekly report for 22 June. We're sliding into the week before the Ubuntu Platform Rally in Dublin, Ireland, and after that we're in Alpha-2 mode, so the team is getting a bunch of house cleaning out the way. In many ways, this should be the last super-boring Unity report as things will get more exciting from here on out, as such we continue to chip away at the rock.
UnityMail is a small Launcher-based mail-alert app for Ubuntu 11.04 capable of displaying the number of unread messages in your inbox. It also has Unity Quicklist support, with a menu containing easy links for composing new messages and accessing your inbox by right-clicking on the launcher icon.
The latest version of the Ubuntu Unity interface has been released, and is available to install from the Ubuntu Desktop Team's Unity PPA.
There's been a lot happening in the Unity world as of late, with a tonne of new contributors fixing loads of bugs, and the list of major bugs and features is growing ever longer. Read on for more!
Add some Ubuntu-themed beauty to your Symbian-powered Nokia handset with the following 'Natty Ubuntu' themes by ~danielfsousaa,
Sergey “Shnatsel” Davidoff has revived his ‘old school gnome-menu-like Dash’ for Ubuntu. The project, which we first wrote about back in March of this year, replaces the stock Unity Dash with a traditional 'GNOME Menu' style layout based on categories.
Google released the latest stable update to their Google Chrome browser earlier today, bringing with it a handful of features exclusive to Ubuntu users...
For Ubuntu 11.04 we made an effort to make Unity easy to contribute to, so that anyone who wanted to participate could help out and help drive the development of Unity forward. During UDS in Budapest, Hungary, we had a session on how we're going to improve this program. As luck would have it this was a video'ed session, and what you'll read in this post is a result of that session and some other feedback from people.
Display unread messages in Thunderbird thanks to a new experimental extension by Huahe, best of all, you don't need an alpha version of Thunderbird to use it either.
Hardware review site Phoronix recently took the time to see how much of a performance dent the popular desktop environments 'inflict' on system performance.
Remote desktop client 'Remmina' doesn't have Ubuntu Unity launcher integration by default, but it's easy enough to add with this script by Daniel S.
Clipboard manager 'Diodon' is to soon add a searchable Unity lens for clipboard entries to its default package.
Reader folkefiende mailed in asking why we don't write something about 'EasyShutdown'. Having never heard of this particular application before I decided to take a look...
Several days back we featured a rather useful app called 'GUnity' that gave you an easy way to tweak the Unity desktop to your liking. 'Confity', pictured below, is a similar application that follows the same 'ethos' as GUnity, only this tool provides a lot more bang for your proverbial free buck.
Some of the most useful applications are often borne out of a personal need. Such as this 'Tea Time' application created specifically for Ubuntu Unity by rojtberg. With Unity lacking support for 'traditional gnome applets', rojtberg had to find a different application. There are 'indicator timers' available - such as this one - but this wasn't ideal for him.
For those times you want to find something online with the hassle of having to open your browser, heading to Google and then searching, try the 'Web Source Lens' for Ubuntu 11.04 Unity.
Ubuntu 11.04 brought with it a shiny new Launcher with shiny new capabilities, such as the ability to display progress bars, count badges and quicklists on application Launcher icons. Although Ubuntu 11.04 didn't see the default application take advantage of these features to any great degree plans are afoot to provide Oneiric's default apps with Unity integration from the get-go.
Reader Mark Tyrrell linked us to a bug report of his that proposes a rather slick solution for the Ubuntu 'Application Menu' reveal behaviour in Unity.