Ubuntu-Maryland LoCo Team Planet

Awesome Unity Contributions

2012-02-23T01:48:45+00:00

Unity is a key piece of Ubuntu, and the Unity experience in Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up to be fantastic across Desktop, TV, and Android.

Yesterday Mike blogged asking for contributors to improve our Quicklist support in the most popular apps in Ubuntu. Within the same day he had a number of awesome contributions made as a response.

I just wanted to offer thanks to our new rock-stars Nekhelesh Ramananthan, Trenton Fox, Prateek Karandikar, and David Baucum who were the first folks to make contributions. Thanks for making the Ubuntu experience even smoother and more integrated.

Mike has since blogged sharing the other most popular apps that need Quicklists; be sure to help if you can…you don’t need to be a coder to contribute. Find out how to contribute here. You can get help for how to participate in #ubuntu-unity on Freenode IRC, and feel free to ask questions in the comments here and Mike and I will help.

You folks will be hearing more and more from Mike over the coming weeks and months about ways in which everyone can help to make Ubuntu that little bit more streamlined, integrated, and enjoyable. Our community is our backbone, and thanks again to Nekhelesh, Trenton, Prateek, and David for being such great examples of this.

Testing Ubuntu Accomplishments

2012-02-22T21:00:10+00:00

I would like to open up Ubuntu Accomplishments to a little wider testing. Please note a few caveats:

You need to be running Ubuntu 12.04 to test this.
This is still a work in progress; there will be bugs.

Please follow the instructions at here for how to install. If you have questions feel free to ping me on IRC (I am jono and I am around in #ubuntu-community-team most of the time).

If you find a bug (and you probably will!), the bug will either be in software itself or one of the accomplishments. Please file bugs using the following links:

Bugs in the daemon and app – file bugs here
Bugs in the Ubuntu Accomplishments set – file bugs here

If you are unsure, just file bugs here.

There is a lot of work going on each day on this, so please be sure to update your branches each day (until we start releasing packages). You can do this with:

cd ubuntu-accomplishments-system
bzr pull

cd ubuntu-community-accomplishments
bzr pull

Thanks!

Writing Accomplishments – Volunteers Needed!

There are only a few accomplishments available in the system right now. The goal here is that accomplishments should be about new experiences. I would like to avoid things such as “50 posts to a bug report” or “500 posts to a forum“; those could be achieved by repeating meaningless content to get the numbers up. I would rather focus on new experiences such as “I have become an Ubuntu Member“, or “I got my first uploaded accepted“.

Writing accomplishments just requires a little knowledge of launchpadlib and Python for Ubuntu Accomplishments, or you can write accomplishments for other projects where you can query a web service.

If you are interested in writing some accomplishments to plug into the system, please see this page and the video tutorial at here.

Thanks!

Ubuntu for Android: The Response

2012-02-22T07:16:33+00:00

Earlier today we announced Ubuntu on Android; the perfect combination of a phone that is powered by Android and when docked provides a full Ubuntu desktop experience. Not only that, but when plugged into a TV you also get the Ubuntu TV experience. All within one consistent and beautiful experience.

I posted this news on Facebook and Google+ today, and in just 12 hours look at the response:

I think this speaks pretty well about how much interest and demand there is in this. Put it this way: in 12 minutes Facebook had over 1000 likes.

If you are a handset maker or network operator, get in touch.

Ubuntu in your pocket

2012-02-21T17:19:31+00:00

The desktop is the killer app for quad-core smartphones in 2012.

We’ll show Ubuntu neatly integrated into Android at Mobile World Congress next week. Carry just the phone, and connect it to any monitor to get a full Ubuntu desktop with all the native apps you want, running on the same device at the same time as Android. Magic. Everything important is shared across the desktop and the phone in real time.

It’s a lightweight way to be – everything seamlessly available with the right interface for the right form factor, with no hassles syncing. It just works, the way Ubuntu should. Lots of work behind the scenes to make both systems share what they need to share, but the desktop is a no-compromise desktop.

This isn’t the “Ubuntu Phone”. The phone experience here is pure Android. This announcement is playing to a different story, which is the convergence of multiple different form factors into one most-personal device. Naturally, the most personal device is the phone, so we want to get all of these different personalities – phone, tablet and desktop – into the phone. When you need a desktop, you connect up to a screen and a keyboard. When you need a tablet, you dock to some very elegant glass.

Just for fun, we’ve integrated the Ubuntu TV experience too – so this isn’t just a desktop in your pocket, it’s a media centre too.

Come and say hello in Barcelona next week, and I’ll be glad to hear what you think of it in person. Everyone we’ve shown it to has had a “wow!” moment. For network operators who have long believed that the phone was the PC of the future for the next billion connected consumers, and for handset manufacturers who want to offer companies a single device for corporate computing, this is a delicious prospect. For those of us who love our desktops free, focused and mobile, it’s nirvana.

Ubuntu Accomplishments Demo

2012-02-21T05:12:42+00:00

After another furious week of hacking on my little project I have added a number of new features:

Trophies that are verified by the verification server are now GPG signed so they can’t be faked on the client.
We now support custom trophy icons; this way Ubuntu can have it’s own themed icons and upstreams could have their own themed icons too. As an example, the Juju accomplishments have different icons to some of the other Ubuntu accomplishments; it just makes each of the accomplishments feel a little more unique and desirable. As an example:

I have improved some of the trophy information page layout.
The app now dynamically updates to show when a trophy has been verified for you. This is in the form of a dbus signal which other clients can use too (such as the Trophies Lens that David has been working on).
I also added a bunch of additional trophies.

To give you a feel for how it runs now, check out this short demo video:

Can’t see the video? See it here!

I am now going to start building up to get some wider eyes and testing on this. If you are running Precise and interested in testing, drop me an email to jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will be in touch soon.