Author Archive

On the 1st of June 2011 I will be departing these shores on an extended honeymoon with my husband of almost 3 months!
I am taking what I believe is officially called ‘a career break’.
We will be traveling from the top to the bottom of the world on a motorbike. (Yes, one motorbike. No, I don’t [...]

Get creative and submit your artwork to this year’s Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. The theme is Freedom.

If you have ever contributed to an open source project or wish you had got round to it then please can you fill in this survey?
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/36WWXCF
It isn’t a quick one, but if you have about 20 minutes to spare then your response would be very much appreciated. I will publish the results on my blog [...]

The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate Idea #25801: Help the user understand when closing a window does not terminate the app. In other words, figure out to signal to the user that an application will [...]

I conducted 5 qualitative interviews with developers and here are some findings.
You have two problems. The first problem is to design the API. The second is to help people learn to use it.
Great API design
Is consistent, predictable, learnable. You are creating an API that developers will interact with. In the same way that a [...]

You won’t be surprised to hear that I am on the Papercutters team and, in that capacity, was on the receiving end of an email from Vish who points out a couple of things: 1) Only a handful of members in the Papercutters team are active on the project. 2) For a project to live [...]

We are looking for a Design Engineer with superb technical and communication skills to join the Design Team. Is that you?

It’s Font Friday – read all about it!

I am happy to announce that we have just updated the Ubuntu Font Beta ppa. Enjoy!

As many of you are most probably aware I work for Canonical and some of my blog posts from here are syndicated to design.canonical.com. I was asked a rather interesting question on that blog and partly due to the impatience of the asker decided to respond by way of a post. My other motivation for [...]