Normally the Ubuntu/Canonical Design Team are busy working on our own projects, but it makes a really good change to work on other Free Software design problems for a change. Starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Monday 7 May 2012, you can join us for the next Ubuntu Design Theatre at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California:

• Live audio-only stream from Room 201
• Freenode #ubuntu-uds-room-201
• Live notes from Room 201

Bring your design issues along and lets see how we can improve them! There should be visual designers, user interface designers, brand designers, … and the many other people who try and work to make users’ lives better with Free Software.

As well as being “just a watch” with a long-lasting e-paper display it has a Bluetooth wireless connection, opening up all sorts of possibilities for expansion; particularly showing notifications, SMS messages, or status and calendar updates without having to check a mobile phone directly. Once it’s on your wrist the possibilites are there for all sorts of apps (not just fancy clocks!).

In under one week they’ve raised $5 million in pre-orders from 35,000 individuals—taking the Kickstarter record for the largest amount raised through crowd-funding. A finished product does not just happen by itself, it requires lots of expertise; industrial design for the water-tight casing, ergonomics to make sure it fits on your wrist, electronics layout design for the battery, buttons and e-ink screen …and some firmware (embedded computer software) to make it all work.

Andrew Witte (second from the left in the dream team) is the Lead Engineer working on the firmware and an Ubuntu fan. Andrew’s desk on a typical day has a sprawl of cables, a Lego car, some low-level JTAG programmers, USB prototyping cables, several half-finished Pebble boards …and, in the middle is Xubuntu (Ubuntu running with an XFCE desktop) for the development and debugging.

Lots of open source is also being used to make the watch tick. The firmware development toolchain is CodeSourcery GCC for compiling, OpenOCD for working with the JTAG, and GDB (the GNU debugger) for finding all hard to solve bugs. One of the main parts of the Pebble is the Bluetooth interface for talking to smart phones, for which many hours have been spent testing with Ben Lam’s Python-based ‘LightBlue’ framework and utilities like hcitool. If that’s all getting a bit technical, Andrew notes that The Gimp and ImageMagick (both in the Ubuntu Software Centre) are used for processing the bitmaps and pictures before they are sent to the Pebble watch prototypes.

The race is on for the first person who can get a prototype in August 2012 and integrate Ubuntu’s libnotify-osd work with the Pebble watch, in time for Ubuntu 12.10 in six months time! For those with a pre-order, it will be possible to vote on additional-colour in addition to Artic White, Cherry Red and Jet Black. We’re hoping that Ubuntu Orange wins!

The Pebble Kickstarter campaign runs until 18 May 2012. To vote later for a colour (such as Ubuntu Orange!) you need to pre-order in the colour-Pebble category ($125+shipping).

Until 27 May 2012 you can see some of those original sketches and designs featuring in the Typobau exhbition at the Körnerpark Gallery in Neukölln, Berlin,

It includes many of Rayan’s design projects from the last decade, including the Bundesadler (the Federal Eagle of Germany) and his many Arabic graphic design and typography projects including the logos and typefaces for Burberry, McDonalds, Nokia Pure Arabic and the Ubuntu Font Family Arabic script coverage.

For keen visitors, the grand opening is this week, at 19:00 on Friday 20 April 2012. Or for anyone visiting Messe Berlin in May 2012 for Linuxtag 2012 you will still be able to catch the exhibition. Just take the S-Bahn ring anti-clockwise to S-Neukölln and see Ubuntu and Rayan’s exhibition at the same time as Linuxtag!

The “Typobau” exhibition runs between 21 April 2012 and 27 May 2012, 10:00–20:00, Tuesday—Sunday, at Körnerpark Galerie, Schierker Strasse 8, Berlin-Neukölln

In Ubuntu 12.10, we plan to refine these menus to address several long-standing problems. If you’re a programmer, tester, or visual designer, there are plenty of opportunities for you to help out.

In updating the design, our general theme has been improving relevance — showing menus, and items in menus, only when they are relevant to you. For example, if you never use a VPN, it shouldn’t take up space in the network menu. If you never use Gwibber, it shouldn’t take up space in the messaging menu. If you never use a Bluetooth device, you shouldn’t need to see the Bluetooth menu. And so on.

System menu

The biggest change to the structure, though, is a straightforward simplification. The two menus at the end of the menu bar, the user and system menus, will merge. As well as saving space, this will fix three main problems:

• “Switch User Account” and “Log Out” were in different menus, despite being closely related. Now, they’ll be in the same menu. (“Lock Screen” and “Switch User Account” will become one and the same command.)
• It’s been hard to find which version of Ubuntu you are using. This will now have a dedicated menu item.
• Finding the Ubuntu Help has also been difficult. That will now have an always-present menu item too.

One more detail. When Ubuntu used a home icon to represent the Nautilus file manager, usability testing found that people thought it was a launcher or starting point. (This isn’t surprising, given the strong connotations of Home in other applications.) The Unity Dash, meanwhile, is exactly that kind of starting point. So one possibility under discussion is changing the Dash launcher icon to a home icon — which the Dash already uses for internal navigation anyway.

How is that relevant to the status menus? It raises the possibility that we could use the Ubuntu logo, if it won’t be in the launcher, as the title of the system menu instead. We plan to test this against the powercog icon, and see which works better.

Clock menu

Many improvements can be made to the clock menu, but the design will remain much the same.

We’d like to add the ability to set a basic alarm, and if it’s set, this will be shown using an icon in the menu title.

If you’re a programmer and know your way around C and GObject, another simple enhancement would be populating the coming events section of the menu from a Web calendar, such as Google Calendar.

Sound menu

The sound menu design will remain unchanged in 12.10. As with the clock menu, though, there are plenty of minor improvements to work on.

Network menu

Ubuntu’s network menu is powered by Network Manager, and our design is a visual presentation of where we’d like to take it in future. It simplifies the current menu by using consistent on/off switches for connection types, removing needless separators, and showing less common functions — mobile broadband and VPNs — only if you have set them up in the Network settings.

Bluetooth menu

As with the network menu, we’d like to simplify the Bluetooth menu by using on/off switches and reducing separators.

Battery menu

The battery menu design will stay the same.

Messaging menu

We plan to simplify the messaging menu by removing the default Chat, Mail, and Broadcast items. Instead, messaging programs will show up only if you have set them up, and will show up under their own names. As well as shortening the menu, this will solve the problem that nobody knows what “Broadcast” means.

In Ubuntu for Android, the messaging menu will naturally expand to show missed calls, voicemail, and SMS messages.

And finally, Ubuntu One will at long last be banished from the messaging menu, moving instead to the menu next door…

Sync menu

The new Sync menu will be present if you use any services such as Ubuntu One, SparkleShare, or Dropbox, that carry out non-urgent synchronization over the network. (Continuing the relevance theme, the menu won’t be present at all if you haven’t signed up for any of those services yet.)

From this menu, you’ll be able to turn each service off and on — turning them off if you’re trying to download something in a hurry, for example. You’ll also be able to access their settings, if they have any.

Keyboard menu

We’d like to make two main improvements to the keyboard menu.

First, combining it with the input method menu. So that if you use input methods (such as for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), you don’t have two separate menus for controlling your keyboard.

And second, making the menu title an icon that represents the current input method or keyboard layout, instead of a generic keyboard icon with added text. (Visual designers could help us here, in finding an elegant way to generate an icon based on the letter code for each layout.)

So long, printing menu, we hardly knew you

In Ubuntu 12.04, a printing status menu appears whenever any print jobs are in progress. Unfortunately, it’s not that noticeable.

So in 12.10, we plan to replace it with a temporary printing item in the launcher. This will correspond to a minimized window listing your recent print jobs. You can close it when done, or just ignore it, as you see fit.

What’s next

As these designs are fleshed out, the individual specifications will be updated in the ‘Unity Application and System Indicators’ section of The Toolkit.

This is a lot of work, and you’re welcome to help out if you can. Pop in to the #ubuntu-unity channel on IRC, or get in touch on the unity-dev@ mailing list.

For example, we consciously place the notifications in the top right of the screen, avoiding space that is particularly precious (like new tab titles, and search boxes). But the indicators are also in the top right, and they make menus, which drop down into the same space a notification might occupy.

Since we know that notifications are queued, no notification is guaranteed to be displayed instantly, so a smarter notification experience would stay out of the way while you were using indicator menus, or get out of the way when you invoke them. The design story of focusayatana, where we balance the need for focus with the need for awareness, would suggest that we should suppress awareness-oriented things in favour of focus things. So when you’re interacting with an indicator menu, we shouldn’t pop up the notification. Since the notification system, and the indicator menu system, are separate parts, the UNIX philosophy sells us short in designing a smart, smooth experience because it says they should each do their thing individually.

Going further, it’s silly that the sound menu next/previous track buttons pop up a notification, because the same menu shows the new track immediately anyway. So the notification, which is purely for background awareness, is distracting from your focus, which is conveying exactly the same information!

But it’s not just the system menus. Apps can play in that space too, and we could be better about shaping the relationship between them. For example, if I’m moving the mouse around in the area of a notification, we should be willing to defer it a few seconds to stay out of the focus. When I stop moving the mouse, or typing in a window in that region, then it’s OK to pop up the notification.

It’s only by looking at the whole, that we can design great experiences. And only by building a community of both system and application developers that care about the whole, that we can make those designs real. So, thank you to all of you who approach things this way, we’ve made huge progress, and hopefully there are some ideas here for low-hanging improvements too

For another cycle a selection of images has been put forward for inclusion in Ubuntu. As there have been some questions on other blogs about the process I thought it was worth doing a quick refresher. Each release we ask the community contributors whose images were included in the last release if they’d like to help choose the images that should go into the up coming release. This release we are endebted to the following Flickr users and community members:

• madeinkobaia
• SirPecanGum
• bolorino
• Deacon MacMillan
• Noah Bertilson
• Micheo
• Fix Peña
• Fejes Ádám
• federica_miglio
• Difusa
• Hugo.Cliff
• Mohamed Malik
• Dh0r
• paco • espinoza
• pr09studio
• Belhor_
• Emilio Merlino
• erin_estes
• j_baer
• fernando garcía redondo
• followtheseinstructions

A key part of any operating system user interface is how it enables the user to switch between multiple tasks. In most desktop operating systems tasks are encapsulated into windows, and the most frequently used method of multi-tasking is window switching. Desktop OSs have multiple methods of window switching (e.g Alt-tab, clicking on indicators, notifications, etc…) however the most common means of window switching is via using what is variously termed a Launcher, Taskbar or Dock. Traditionally there has been a 1:1 correlation between each window and its representation in the Taskbar (see Windows2000 or Gnome2).

(Ubuntu Hardy Heron used Gnome2 which featured one taskbar icon per window)

With Windows XP, Microsoft introduced a way to aggregate multiple windows that belonged to the same application into a single task bar button. This change was primarily focused towards personas who made heavy use of multi-tasking; this feature only switched on when the number of windows represented in the Taskbar exceeded the length of the Taskbar. It gave the benefits of increasing the number of windows that could be comfortably represented in the available task bar space, and reduced the time and effort it took the user to visually scan a crowded Taskbar and identify an application. The cost of this change was that an additional click was required to switch to a window that was not the most recently focused window of that application.

(The WindowsXP desktop that introduced the concept of representing multiple windows with one taskbar icon)

Unity’s current window switching functionality

Fast forwarding to 2009, when working on the original designs for Unity we knew that window switching was one of the key areas of any OS’s user interface, and we set out to design a window switching paradigm that would surpass the utility and usability of the contemporary competition at the time (Windows 7 and OSX Snow Leopard). The Launcher was only 50% of that equation, the other 50% was a set of functionality we termed the ‘Spread’.

The Spread designs were completed, prototyped and tested well before the launch of Unity with 11.04, but unfortunately due to the huge number of other items that needed to be completed before we could launch a brand new desktop shell, the decision was made to postpone the development of this feature and use the Compiz equivalent of this functionality as a stop-gap measure.

(Compiz window switching in Ubuntu 11.04)

While using the Compiz window switching functionality enabled us to hit 11.04 launch deadline, there are a number ways in which it could be improved. Since then many many bugs, mailing list and forum postings have also requested the same set of functionality that was postponed as a result of this decision. Requests we frequently receive include:

• Please make it easier to tell one window from another, all terminals look very similar!
• Make it easier to select windows using keyboard navigation and shortcuts
• I would like to be able to easily close windows from the window switcher view
• Can you make it clearer to see which application’s windows are currently being displayed (in the switcher view)?
• I find it difficult to see which window is currently focused in the window switcher view, can this be improved?
• Can you find a way to make window switching faster?

Window switching requirements

After researching the window switching problem space and examining the use cases that a window switcher needs to support, we distilled the findings into a set of design requirements. These were:

• To aid window identification, the window previews should to be as large as possible, taking maximum advantage of the available screen real estate.
• Window switching needs to be very intuitive and easy to understand for new users. In user testing, a user who has never used Ubuntu before must be able to switch windows without encountering any difficulty.
• More experienced users should be offered an accelerated method of ultra-fast window switching.
• Users should be presented with all the information that is pertinent to making a window switching decision, but no more.
• The window switching mechanism should follow the activity/task hierarchy, in order to minimise time needed to identity the required application, support intensive multi-tasking use cases with very large numbers of windows, simplify the Launcher ordering problem, and make the most efficient use of the Launcher’s screen real estate.

A very brief introduction the ‘Spread’

So now with 12.04 almost behind us, we have dusted off our original Spread designs and given them a light spring clean ahead of development starting in 12.10. So without further ado…

This design shows when happens when a user clicks on the Firefox icon to spread the available windows. The maximum amount of screen real estate is dedicated to making the window previews as large as possible. Moving the pointer over any of the previews will display the window name in a window title bar, and a close button is included so that any window can be dismissed directly from this view. When in this view users can also directly switch to spreads of other running applications by clicking on application icons in the Launcher.

In addition to pointing and clicking with a mouse or trackpad, power users can perform all window switching actions without taking their hands off the keyboard. Holding down the SUPER key will reveal the Launcher with numbers overlaid on top of the individual Launcher icons.

Pressing a number performs the equivalent action to a left click, so if a app is already focused pressing its number will reveal a spread of its windows.

When the spread is revealed, numbers are displayed in the bottom left corner of the previews. Pressing a number will then select the relevant window and close the Spread. Added together this allows a power user to switch to any window of any application just by using the SUPER and NUMBER keys. In addition users will be able to navigate the Spread by using cursor keys to move the orange focus box and ENTER to select.

Another new feature is the ghost window ‘New Window’ option. Previously if a user wanted to open a new window for an application that was already running they had to either middle click on the application’s Launcher icon or press CTRL+N. The problem was that new users had no easy way of discovering these options. When using the Spread, a user can select the ghost window to open a new window of the currently focused application. This feature has even more benefits in a multi-monitor context, and if a application does not support multiple windows this option is not displayed.

Other features include the ability to filter the windows by typing…

and of course this new functionality apples to the SUPER+W spread of all windows on the desktop.

Multi-monitors, workspaces, and all the other gory details

This article only takes a very brief look at a few of the Spread’s features, and barely scratches the surface of the Spread design. A lot of thought has also gone into designing how the spread works in multi-monitor and/or multi-workspace environments, and if you are interested in learning more and reading all the gory details of how every corner case and eventuality is handled, head over to Unity Switching section of the The Toolkit to read the full spec.

We did this using Flickr and since then the group has been inundated with over 2,700 submissions! This is an incredible achievement in a reasonably short time and many of the entries are looking great.

Charline, on the Canonical Design Team, contacted me earlier today to ask about what comes next. Well, first of all I’d like to thank everyone who has submitted thus far. It’s an incredible amount of user generated content and we should be chuffed to bits to have so much good stuff to sort through. Next I’d also like to encourage anyone who _has_ submitted to review what they’ve placed in the group. We are about to ask a small group of people to select from nearly three thousand images. If you’ve submitted more than one image if you could please review your images and decide if we really should be considering them all that would be a huge help

Lastly, don’t forget the deadline for submissions is March 15th 18:00 UK time. At that point I’ll close the group and the judges will start sorting through these entries. Then from their selection we’ll try and get down to a number of images that can be safely fitted onto the CD image. As always we’ll separate out the entries selected into their own group and we’re also looking into making a package of all the selected images so the completionists out there can get all the wallpapers in one easy package.

Easy, huh? Well you don’t have to sort through 3000 images in a week! Happy snapping, sketching and scanning!

Ubuntu and Canonical had a very strong presence at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The main attraction was our Ubuntu for Android prototype that was published just a week earlier. The beautiful cubic pavilion also housed the Ubuntu TV demo, Ubuntu One, and our established desktop and cloud offerings. The booth attracted a constant flux of curious visitors representing all walks of life: media, industry people, businessmen, technology enthusiasts, students and… competitors.

John Lea, Oren Horev and myself from the Design Team joined Canonical sales, business and technical staff in this bold effort. In addition to running demos and having interesting conversations with the visitors to the booth, we also had the opportunity to have a look at the endless exhibition halls and floors of the conference and do research on what makes the mobile world tick at the moment.

If the MWC 2012 had to be summarised in one tagline, anyone would probably admit, that it was a one massive Androidfest.

Google’s recently upgraded operating system was simply everywhere. Spearheading the Android avalanche were the latest generation supermobiles – every device manufacturer was showing off with their versions of quad-core, high-definition, 4G/LTE smartphones and tablets bumped up to the latest specification.

Bells and whistles ranged from glasses-free 3D displays to Dolby sound to watertight casings – demonstrating that OEM customisations go beyond branding and skinning the interface.

Google themselves hosted an extensive Android area that was more like a theme park than a typical business affair: fans and passers-by were treated to a smoothie bar, a tube slide (presumably an homage to Google offices), grab-a-plush-Android game – and lucky ones could have had their Nexus phones pimped up with Svarovski crystals assembled by an industrial robot.

In stark contrast to Google’s rather playful attitude towards their ecosystem, the manufacturers were more poised for flexing their technological muscle. The impending hockey-stick curve of serious mobile computing power seems to all but prove the concept behind Ubuntu for Android. The phones of the near future are going to effortlessly run desktop and mobile operating systems simultaneously, and those extra cores can do more than just keep your hands warm in your pocket. Similarly, in our hands-on testing, the demoed 4G/LTE connections were lightning fast, signalling that accessing your cloud and thin client applications from a phone running a full productivity desktop can shift the paradigms of your mobile working life.

While this year’s congress was overrun by Android, it will be interesting to see whether this will be repeated next year, when we can assume to see the effects of Google’s Motorola acquisition and the impact of Windows 8. The latter had reached Consumer Preview stage and was presented in a separate session outside the main exhibition.

Most of the manufacturers had an odd Windows Phone in their inventory, but basically its marketing was left to Nokia, who also occupied a substantial exhibition floor not far from us. The newfound underdogs were quite upbeat about their Lumia phones, 41 megapixel cameras and the staff were very approachable in their stripy Marimekko shirts and funny hats.

In one of the quieter affairs, the Nokia Research Centre demoed an indoor positioning system that promises 30 centimere accuracy and presumably lands in a Bluetooth standard in the near future, enabling a range of user experience scenarios for malls, airports and alike. Affordable Asha phones and Nokia Life for emerging markets were featured as well.

Aside from phones, there were a number of smart TV upstarts. We saw a few demos built on old versions of Android, where a phone interface jumped on the screen as soon as the user leaves the home screen. A more captivating demo came from the Korean company Neo Mtel, who showed off a UI with lots of lively widgets and affectionate animations. They also had a tablet-based “second screen” to complement the product vision.

Perhaps a little surprisingly, Opera (of the Opera browser fame) showcased a TV platform based on web technologies.

In Hall 7 we also had the pleasure of having Mozilla as our next door neighbours. They had set up a nice lounge where people could try out the latest Firebox browser for Android phone and tablet. The Boot to Gecko initiative had matured into the Open Web Device together with Telefonica, and resulted in a working demo of a phone OS, based entirely on web technologies with APIs to talk to the handset’s camera, sensors and telephony software, for example. It was also interesting to exchange thoughts on open-source design and development with the fine Mozilla employees.

Meanwhile, there were some interesting evolutions in device form factors to be discovered. Samsung exhibited a 10-inch Galaxy Note tablet with Adobe Photoshop Touch and very precise and responsive drawing stylus. With the exception of tactile feedback the experience is closing in on that of pen and paper – and for many, the benefits of digital malleability can outweigh the constraints of analogue tools.

Notepad-sized phones are parallel to this trend. The Galaxy Note phone got a rival from LG’s 5-inch Optimus Vu. Both devices channel the passport-size Moleskine or Muji notepad and flaunt oversized screens and stylus input. To prove the point, Samsung had dragged a bunch of portrait street artists to capture the likenesses of volunteering visitors on these polished pixelslates.

The requirement of pocketability and one-handed use has caused many (starting with Apple) to overlook this emerging form factor, but not everyone keeps their mobiles in their pockets and many use their phones with two hands anyway. It will be interesting to see how the notepad phones fare in the market and what kind of UI patterns will prevail there.

Last, but not least, the Padphone from ASUS is a very interesting play on device convergence and as such resonates with Ubuntu for Android. The Padphone is a smartphone that docks into a tablet shell and instantly becomes a tablet. The tablet with the phone inside can then be docked into a keyboard, turning the device into a laptop. While some clunkiness with the hardware remains, the user interface seems to transition from phone to tablet seamlessly and in a snap. However, there’s less wow in the tablet-to-laptop transition, where just a mouse pointer is added into the mix. Since Android is designed for touch this is no surprise, but there’s some added value in having a physical keyboard for typing.

Amidst all the sensory overload and throughout the four days of congress, the Ubuntu booth felt like an oasis of good vibes all the time. The interest and support from people we encountered was really encouraging and very heartwarming. Hands-on videos from the booth went viral across the internet. Many said that Ubuntu for Android was the highlight of the Mobile World Congress 2012.

Visit the Ubuntu for Android site for more…

For the first time with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, real desktop user experience innovation is available on a full production-ready enterprise-certified free software platform, free of charge, well before it shows up in Windows or MacOS. It’s not ‘job done’ by any means, but it’s a milestone. Achieving that milestone has tested the courage and commitment of the Ubuntu community – we had to move from being followers and integrators, to being designers and shapers of the platform, together with upstreams who are excited to be part of that shift and passionate about bringing goodness to a wide audience. It’s right for us to design experiences and help upstreams get those experiences to be amazing, because we are closest to the user; we are the last mile, the last to touch the code, and the first to get the bug report or feedback from most users.

Thank you, to those who stood by Ubuntu, Canonical and me as we set out on this adventure. This was a big change, and in the face of change, many wilt, many panic, and some simply find that their interests lie elsewhere. That’s OK, but it brings home to me the wonderful fellowship that we have amongst those who share our values and interests – their affiliation, advocacy and support is based on something much deeper than a fad or an individualistic need, it’s based on a desire to see all of this intellectual wikipedia-for-code value unleashed to support humanity at large, from developers to data centre devops to web designers to golden-years-ganderers, serving equally the poorest and the bankers who refuse to serve them, because that’s what free software and open content and open access and level playing fields are all about.

To those of you who rolled up your sleeves and filed bugs and wrote the documentation and made the posters or the cupcakes, thank you.

You’ll be as happy to read this comment on unity-design:

I’m very serious about loving the recent changes. I think I’m a fair representative of the elderly community ………. someone who doesn’t particularly care to learn new things, but just wants things to make sense. I think we’re there! Lance

You’ll be as delighted with the coverage of Ubuntu for Android at MWC in Barcelona last week:

“one of the more eye-catching concepts being showcased” – v3
“sleeker, faster, potentially more disruptive” - IT Pro Portal
“you can also use all the features of Android” - The Inquirer
“I can easily see the time when I will be carrying only my smartphone” - UnwiredView
“everything it’s been claimed to be” - Engadget
“Efficiency, for the win!” - TechCrunch
“phones that become traditional desktops have the potential to benefit from the extra processing power” - GigaOM
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future of computing” - IntoMobile

Free software distils the smarts of those of us who care about computing, much like Wikipedia does. Today’s free software draws on the knowledge and expertise of hundreds of thousands of individuals, all over the world, all of whom helped to make this possible, just like Wikipedia. It’s only right that the benefits of that shared wisdom should accrue to everyone without charge, which is why contributing to Ubuntu is the best way to add leverage to the contributions made everywhere else, to ensure they have the biggest possible impact. It wouldn’t be right to have to pay to have a copy of Wikipedia on your desk at the office, and the same is true of the free software platform. The bits should be free, and the excellent commercial services optional. That’s what we do at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, and that’s why we do it.

Engineers are human beings too!

We set out to refine the experience for people who use the desktop professionally, and at the same time, make it easier for the first-time user. That’s a very hard challenge. We’re not making Bob, we’re making a beautiful, easy to use LCARS . We measured the state of the art in 2008 and it stank on both fronts. When we measure Ubuntu today, based on how long it takes heavy users to do things, and a first-timer to get (a different set of) things done, 12.04 LTS blows 10.04 LTS right out of the water and compares favourably with both MacOS and Windows 7. Unity today is better for both hard-core developers and first-time users than 10.04 LTS was. Hugely better.

For software developers:

• A richer set of keyboard bindings for rapid launching, switching and window management
• Pervasive search results in faster launching for occasional apps
• Far less chrome in the shell than any other desktop; it gets out of your way
• Much more subtle heuristics to tell whether you want the launcher to reveal, and to hint it’s about to
• Integrated search presents a faster path to find any given piece of content
• Magic window borders and the resizing scrollbar make for easier window sizing despite razor-thin visual border
• Full screen apps can include just the window title and indicators – full screen terminal with all the shell benefits

… and many more. In 12.04 LTS, multi-monitor use cases got a first round of treatment, we will continue to refine and improve that every six months now that the core is stable and effective. But the general commentary from professionals, and software developers in particular, is “wow”. In this last round we have focused testing on more advanced users and use cases, with user journeys that include many terminal windows, and there is a measurable step up in the effectiveness of Unity in those cases. Still rough edges to be sure, even in this 12.04 release (we are not going to be able to land locally-integrated menus in time, given the freeze dates and need for focus on bug fixes) but we will SRU key items and of course continue to polish it in 12.10 onwards. We are all developers, and we all use it all the time, so this is in our interests too.

For the adventurous, who really want to be on the cutting edge, the (totally optional) HUD is our first step to a totally new kind of UI for complex apps. We’re deconstructing the traditional UI, expressing goodness from the inside out. It’s going to be a rich vein of innovation and exploration, and the main beneficiaries will be those who use computers to create amazing things, whether it’s the kernel, or movies. Yes, we are moving beyond the desktop, but we are also innovating to make the desktop itself, better.

We care about efficiency, performance, quality, reliability. So do developers and engineers. We care about beauty and ease of use – turns out most engineers and developers care about that too. I’ve had lots of hard-core engineers tell me that they “love the challenges the design team sets”, because it’s hard to make easy software, and harder to make it pixel-perfect. And lots that have switched back to Ubuntu from the MacOS because devops on Ubuntu… rock.

The hard core Linux engineers can use… anything, really. Linus is probably equally comfortable with Linux-from-scratch as with Ubuntu. But his daughter Daniela needs something that works for human beings of all shapes, sizes, colours and interests. She’s in our audience. I hope she’d love Ubuntu if she tries it. She could certainly install it for herself while Dad isn’t watching Linus and other kernel hackers are our audience too, of course, but they can help himself if things get stuck. We have to shoulder the responsibility for the other 99%. That’s a really, really hard challenge – for engineers and artists alike. But we’ve made huge progress. And doing so brings much deeper meaning to the contributions of all the brilliant people that make free software, everywhere.

Again, thanks to the Ubuntu community, 500 amazing people at Canonical, the contributors to all of the free software that makes it possible, and our users.