February 16th, 2011 byHey Ubuntu One and Design fans! This is my first post here, and I have to say I feel priveledged to be able to write to you all. Recently I’ve been working with the Ubuntu One team on the desktop syncing apps, and trying to give them some special attention. I feel like these apps have the potential to be such an important part of not only the Ubuntu experience, but also the experience of users who may not have converted over to Ubuntu yet. As such, these are some of my personal motivations for my design work on Ubuntu One:
1. Make a good first impression
Ubuntu One has a great opportunity (as a cross-platform application and service) to be a bit of an evangelist for Ubuntu. Just like iTunes and Safari have been evangelists for the Mac experience on Windows, the Ubuntu One desktop app should introduce people to all the best things about Ubuntu. I want users under Windows to see and experience this amazing application and be hungry for more. I want them asking how to get more of our software on their computers. And with that, have an expectation that all the software we ship is going to be better than what they’re used to. Which is why I think it’s important that we…
2. Set a good example
Ubuntu One is one of only a couple of applications that users will see that was actually built from the ground up by Canonical. In this way, it should set a good example for others to follow. If we can’t provide applications with great design, we can’t expect our partners and community to. It has been said by Mahatma Gandhi that, “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.” In this way, I want to set a positive example with this small part of the desktop that every other application is going to be envious of and strive to acheive. This leads right into my next goal:
3. Offer a Superior experience
Above all, Ubuntu One should (as all of our work should) offer a superior experience simply for the intrinsic value of making our users happy. The Ubuntu One team firmly believes that the best way to attract more users and developers is to build something so great that people naturally want to be a part of it. As we heard from MPT (in his now quite infamous talk at UDS Natty), Ubuntu needs to be Useable and Keepable. That means providing a specific kind of desktop experience. Not only one that “gets the job done”, but one that people are going to prefer over any other available experience.
With those things in mind, let’s make this rock 
The toolkit
12 Responseshide comments
It’s Gandhi, not Ghandi
oops, thanks for catching the typo!
Any news from the U1 Dash under Ubuntu and Windows?
Under Ubuntu, it will be supporting third-party themes? And what happened with U1 Windows? It appears to be abandoned
Nice post, I love the third point you write about.
You mean the Control Panel, Right?
On Ubuntu natty (11.04) it looks like it already supports themes… Although admittedly some of the elements and widgets don’t look amazing on some themes…
I expected better integration of Ubuntu One with Ubuntu.
However it fails like many other cloud storage: its support for file metadata is really insufficient.
No file creation/modification date. No execution bit on files.
I wanted to synchonize my ~/bin between my Ubuntu systems using Ubuntu One, but those missing basic features go against it.
File a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone/+filebug
I love Ubuntu One. It’s been amazingly useful. Having all of my documents and notes synced across multiple machines is such a boon (as I’m rarely in one place for too long).
“Just like iTunes and Safari have been evangelists for the Mac experience on Windows”
You must be kidding. These two apps work so badly under Windows no one would think of going to a Mac to see more of that terrible experience. What Apple has done is trying to show how bad their apps work on Windows, then tell everyone they will work much better on OS X so people leave Windows behind. That is a completely different scheme from what you’re depicting.
On the other hand, I’m not an Ubuntu One user. Does its clients have any menus you are eager remove, Dan?
Well, if Ubuntu One ends up being built on the same ideas as elementary, there will be one app to track which files you’ve placed in the cloud, a different app to view the files within the cloud, a different app to actually sync data between files on your computer and files within the cloud, a different app to download any files that may have been put into the cloud, and (finally) a separate app to tie all those things together. All in the name of efficiency.
Well, obviously you are exaggerating, but it’s true that the elementary vehemently follows the Unix philosophy: “Do one thing, and do it well”
That’s funny John, but I think the approach we’re actually going to pursue in regards to U1 and elementary is integration on the App level. In other words, we’re not planning on having any of those kinds of apps at all. You’ll simply opt-in different applications to U1 and they will take care of which folders to handle and what data to pass.
In the case of strict file sync, Nautilus is already set up to be the app that manages which files and folders are synced with U1. For easy music streaming, BeatBox can tell U1 which is the folder your music is stored in and automatically handle that. etc, etc.