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Blog posts tagged "Design"

When it comes to social networking what are you? Door, Mirror, Room?

Everyone belongs to one, two or more social networking sites. At Canonical, we wondered “What does social networking mean to people?” I set off to find out.  I went to people’s homes, sat with them at their computers, looked at the social networking sites they belong to, at their friends, and observed them using the

A global menu for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition

The Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition will use a single consolidated menu, displayed in the panel, rather than individual menus in each application window.

Refining the battery status menu

As part of the notification area transition, we’re adapting the Gnome Power Manager item to be a system status menu. We’re interested in your feedback on the design and any improvements we can make.

Magical Mystery Cafe

There will be those of you reading this who will say “only in Japan” and ordinarily I would shy away from that sort of thing but in this case I think you’re right. Cabel Sasser is co-founder of a software company I’ve long admired and found a very interesting place to get a drink while

New strategic plan!

Came across this on the delightful Swissmiss. We are always in the process of reviewing our development processes a both design and technical to keep them Lean and agile and the chap quoted here is Herb Kelleher of Southwest airlines fame. Southwest are renowned for the way that the run their company. Highly responsive to

Curious displays

Video on Vimeo by Julia Yu Tsao showing an interesting, and very futuristic, concept to display information in a physical environment.

Future of eBooks?

Video from YouTube of the Element iPad application.

It’s good to talk

Only a few posts in and our design blog is teeming with lively debate! Don’t forget that you can comment on these posts but if you feel an idea warrants a more open or broad conversation bring them over to the Ayatana mailing list. You can get involved in Ayatana by heading over to its

CHI paper: What would other programmers do: suggesting solutions to error messages

Abstract Interpreting compiler errors and exception messages is challenging for novice programmers. Presenting examples of how other programmers have corrected similar errors may help novices understand and correct such errors. This paper introduces HelpMeOut, a social recommender system that aids the debugging of error messages by sugges

Farewell to the notification area

Ubuntu is phasing out the traditional Gnome notification area, because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification mechanisms instead. Some notification area items will be replaced by various system status menus

Ubuntu wallpapers

In case anyone is missing their favourite wallpapers from Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) in 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) there is good news!The ubuntu-wallpapers-extra package is installable from the universe repository. In order to install it from the Soft

What makes a good design critic?

While at CHI earlier this week, I went along to a session with the same title as this blog post. I was looking for some inspiration, something to take to a UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) session perhaps, something to turn into a blog post, food for thought.The session at CHI included a food critic, a

Reasons to celebrate 15th April 2010

Karmic saw the first community wallpaper competition and delivered us a beautiful set of photographs for our desktops.Last cycle’s winners were this cycles judges and everyone has delivered.Ladies and gentlemen I give you the results of the wallpaper competition!Congratulations to the winners and huge thanks to the judges. I know, from my

My image of the day

An example of Gemma Correll’s work.

The process of certainty. And mojitos.

You know that feeling when you know someone very well and you buy them a present? You know they will love it and you are excited at the very thought of their delight? Part of you is a little scared though. A few butterflies in the stomach. What if I have misread? What if they

The Digital Economy Bill: Bananas!

Over at Confused of Calcutta, JP Rangaswami has written a crystal clear article on why we should be concerned about the content and treatment of the Digital Economy Bill.Wherever you live, whatever your interests I urge you to read it.If you live in the UK, whatever your position I urge you to write to your