News, tips and features on the Unity desktop environment, the default shell in Ubuntu.
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.
'Gunity' provides options for tweaking aspects of the Unity interfacec without the need to install Compiz-Config Settings manager, wade through dconf settings apply scripts - all via one app.
