The Source

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

Long-term support (LTS) version of popular desktop operating system generally available on 29 April Canonical announced today the upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop Edition, the latest version of the popular Linux desktop distribution, which includes three years of support through free security and maintenance updates. It will b

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.

Canonical announces strong ISV and open source ecosystem support for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Canonical today revealed strong software vendor support for the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-term Support) release for both server and desktop. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, to be released on 29 April 2010, will ship with hundreds of open source applications avai

Long-term support (LTS) version of popular server operating system generally available on 29 April Canonical today announced the upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition which includes extended security and maintenance updates free of charge to all users for five years (versus 18 months for a standard release). The third and la

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.

Earlier this year, MuleSoft approached us with the desire to partner and offer to work with Canonical to improve our default java container, Tomcat, for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server. The idea was to make Tomcat on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS easier to download, install, and configure on Ubuntu than JBOSS is on RHEL. The Ubuntu Server

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