Blog posts tagged "Design"

Using a single menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of separate menu bars inside each window, seems like a pretty simple change. But it’s more complex than it appears, and we’ll need lots of help.

“Windicators” are window indicators, on the right of the title bar, which follow the same pattern as the Ayatana indicators that Ubuntu uses on in the panel.

One of the first things I did when I joined Canonical just over a year ago was conduct some user research. The idea was to identify some broad areas that needed to be addressed and so I devised sessions that included topics like dealing with music and photos, browsing the Internet, chatting with friends, etc.

Drum roll please….After a *lot* of amazing effort from the Canonical design team I am pleased to announce that preliminary Ubuntu visual identity is online and available to all!.If you’ve never worked through such a process before the amount of work

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Video from YouTube of the Element iPad application.

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

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

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

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

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