If you want to get a good idea about the Unity Heads-Up-Display, Jo-Erlend Schinstad has a good description of why he thinks It’s A Great Idea. It is also interesting that the first comment completely ignores his initial point about the media representation of the innovation and instead reinforces it. Up until now, there’s been [...]
It appears that Shuttleworth has noticed a lot of the hate about Unity. He also seems to have a good understanding of why it exists and he has a plan. We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of [...]
The new user interface in Ubuntu really shakes some folks up. jorge’s stompbox has The Power User’s Guide to Unity that provides an index to the Q&A for Ubuntu users and developers on common issues. There are also links to videos and other guides about Unity. The list of application indicators, for instance, says to [...]
When Canonical decided to offer the Unity desktop with its Ubuntu distribution, it set off a firestorm. A lot of geeks went ballistic and are still spraying shrapnel all over the place. For instance, see Ubuntu 11.10 without Unity shell shock and its comments. What happened is that the Gnome menu driven interface was changed. [...]
Manuel Jose describes 15 Things I Did After Installing New Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and the list provides a good idea of how little is really needed. The commentary has some of typical ‘anti Unity interface’ trolling but the post is worth a look. 1) (as always) update the install 2) Ubuntu extras by check [...]
Tech Laze has their 10 ways in which Ubuntu can improve Unity – not a bad list and some good ideas. But it gets me to thinking that Canonical’s biggest problem was not following the geek model. You can tweak and twiddle and customize the desktop interface components but you need special apps and things. [...]
The Apple OS X, 10.7, Lion system upgrade is getting a lot of press. Darrel Etherington says Lion is a significant change for OS X, both from a development back-end perspective, and for end-users, too. In fact, it may represent the most significant update of any point release since the introduction of Mac OS 10.0. [...]
A couple of references for getting Natty up to par: 12 Things I did After Installing New Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” and 10 Useful Application Indicators for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and Top 6 Quicklists for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty to Enhance Unity Launcher Functionality There are two check boxes during install that will add mp3 [...]
For some reason, the numeric keypad on the keyboard stopped being usable to enter numbers. — turns out that it was in ‘mouse mode’ where its function was to move the mouse pointer around rather than to type in numbers. Hitting the numlock key did turn on and off the numlock indicator in the status [...]
One of the primary benefits of the Debian based Linux distributions is the collection of ready to install applications. Ubuntu has leveraged this benefit with its software center and with the Launchpad Personal Package Archive or PPA. The PPA is a “hosting service for public software development” (Ubuntu News 27 November 2007). Launchpad is fast [...]