So, who’s up for making Maverick Movies? It would be great to have a “10 best features in 10.10″ video collection for release. Unity’s awesome and then there are things to show off in OO.o, Gnome, Firefox…. giving credit where it’s due.

I put together https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMovies as a starting place to aggregate content. Have subscribed, so if you update that page I’ll see it. If that goes nicely, we can beef the process up in the runup to release.

What will it be? A Naiant Nailtail would make a fine coat of arms, but we’re not really in the business of arms. Most of our businesses have legs. Most, I say. We could hedge our bets and go with the Neutral Newt, but it’s placing bets and seeing them through that raises the game for the free software desktop, and now’s a time of great change and invention, not a time for fence-sitting.

I’ve been procrastinating. The N-evitable nature of our cadence means that calls for something nicer than “Maverick+1″ are increasingly noticeable. Naively, I always assume that the answer will leap off the page. Instead, what leaps off the page is a gazillion permutations and combinations of nubile, naughty, naiad and nymph. Moving swiftly onward I linger on the possibilities of the Numbat. Nah. There’s no doubt Fourecks can be a rich source of inspiration, now’s not the time to celebrate Van Diemen’s Land, we’ve better plans for that. And speaking of Fourecks, the Nobby Noctule sounds like something dreamed up by Terry Pratchett, perhaps a fitting way to move beyond Adam’s 10.10.10, but it really is hard to sing the praises of a bat. Especially one with (k)nobs.

As you can imagine, after a few weeks with a dictionary and colouring in book of animals, I could draw this out N-definitely. The problem is NP-complete, which I’m now reliably informed by the good folks at HP means it’s provably quite difficult and not something that can be delegated to chips of the non-quantum kind. My chips are most definitely non-quantum though my bugs, strangely, are.

Where did that leave us?

Well, let’s look at what we want to get done.

We have this whole design thing in full flow, which is making Ubuntu sleeker and more stylish, as well as making it smoother for those who just want to get stuff done. We’ll make the N release the best-dressed ever. But classy covers don’t equate to good reads – we want style and substance to meet and get along famously. Once Maverick is out the door we’ll be turning our attention to making the most of the amazing capabilities of modern graphics hardware, both for outer beauty and for inner efficiency. There’s a lot more to GL than glitz and glamour, though we won’t say no to either.

We’re also putting a lot of work into chips and architectures (admittedly, not yet of the quantum sort) that keep cool, and help keep the planet cool in the process. So it would be nice to have a codename which reflects that goodness. Some sort of mascot for a cool planet would do the trick.

And so, we come swiftly to a conclusion: allow me to introduce the Natty Narwhal, our mascot for development work that we expect to deliver as Ubuntu 11.04.

The Narwhal, as an Arctic (and somewhat endangered) animal, is a fitting reminder of the fact that we have only one spaceship that can host all of humanity (trust me, a Soyuz won’t do for the long haul to Alpha Centauri). And Ubuntu is all about bringing the generosity of all contributors in this functional commons of code to the widest possible audience, it’s about treating one another with respect, and it’s about being aware of the complexity and diversity of the ecosystems which feed us, clothe us and keep us healthy. Being a natty narwhal, of course, means we have some obligation to put our best foot forward. First impressions count, lasting impressions count more, so let’s make both and make them favourable.

While it may not in fact get you a pony, the world of free software is the platform upon which the future is being built. So the Narwhal, as the closest thing to a real live unicorn, is an auspicious figurehead as we lay down the fabric from which dreams will be woven. Dreams of someone’s first PC, dreams of someone’s first million instances in the cloud: whatever your vision of the future, we hope the Natty Narwhal will have something to offer. Test your gems against that unicorn – some will be glass, others of value. Perhaps the unicorn will bring you Luck, perhaps a cure for poisons proprietary. One thing is certain: we’ll be building it together with thousands of the most generous, insightful, fun people on the planet – not only those in the Ubuntu community, but those who participate in the whole of the free software ecosystem, from a2jmidid to zzliplib, with Debian (happy Birthday!, now longer in the tooth, wiser, but as potent and principled as ever) a special partner. I’m looking forward to the ride, and the result!

You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today. By release, we expect you’ll be able to use it with a range of devices from major manufacturers, and with addons like Apple’s Magic Trackpad.

The design team has lead the way, developing a “touch language” which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”. The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions. It’s not quite the difference between banging rocks together and conducting a symphony orchestra, but it feels like a good step in the right direction

The new underlying code is published on Launchpad under the GPLv3 and LGPLv3, and of course there are quite a lot of modules for things like X and Gtk which may be under licenses preferred by those projects. There’s a PPA if you’re interested in tracking the cutting edge, or just branch / push/ merge on LP if you want to make it better. Details in the official developer announcement. The bits depend on Peter Hutterer’s recently published update to the X input protocols related to multi-touch, and add gesture processing and gesture event delivery. I’d like to thank Duncan McGreggor for his leadership of the team which implemented this design, and of course all the folks who have worked on it so far: Henrik Rydberg, Rafi Rubin, Chase Douglas, Stephen Webb at the heart of it, and many others who have expanded on their efforts.

In Maverick, quite a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling. We’ll enhance Evince to show some of the richer interactions that developers might want to add to their apps. Window management will be gesture-enabled in Unity, so 10.10 Netbook Edition users with touch screens or multi-touch pads will have sophisticated window management at their fingertips. Install Unity on your desktop for a taste of it, just apt-get install ubuntu-netbook and choose the appropriate session at login.

The roadmap beyond 10.10 will flesh out the app developer API and provide system services related to gesture processing and touch. It would be awesome to have touch-aware versions of all the major apps – browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback – for 11.04, but that depends on you! So if you are interested in this, let’s work up some branches Here’s the official Canonical blog post, too.

There are a couple of hallmarks of tribal argument:

1. “The other guys have never done anything useful”. Well, let’s think about that. All of us wake up every day, with very similar ambitions and goals. I’ve travelled the world and I’ve never met a single company, or country, or church, where *everybody* there did *nothing* useful. So if you see someone saying “Microsoft is totally evil”, that’s a big red flag for tribal thinking. It’s just like someone saying “All black people are [name your prejudice]“. It’s offensive nonsense, and you would be advised to distance yourself from it, even if it feels like it would be fun to wave that pitchfork for a while.

2. “Evidence contrary to my views doesn’t count.” So, for example, when a woman makes it to the top of her game, “it’s because she slept her way there”. Offensive nonsense. And similarly, when you see someone saying “Canonical didn’t actually sponsor that work by that Canonical employee, that was done in their spare time”, you should realize that’s likely to be offensive nonsense too.

Let’s be clear: tribalism makes you stupid. Just like it would be stupid not to hire someone super-smart and qualified because they’re purple, or because they are female, it would be stupid to refuse to hear and credit someone with great work just because they happen to be associated with another tribe.

The very uncool thing about being a fanboy (or fangirl) of a project is that you’re openly declaring both a tribal affiliation and a willingness to reject the work of others just because they belong to a different tribe.

One of the key values we hold in the Ubuntu project is that we expect everyone associated with Ubuntu to treat people with respect. It’s part of our code of conduct – it’s probably the reason we *pioneered* the use of codes of conduct in open source. I and others who founded Ubuntu have seen how easily open source projects descend into nasty, horrible and unproductive flamewars when you don’t exercise strong leadership away from tribal thinking.

Now, bad things happen everywhere. They happen in Ubuntu – and because we have a huge community, they are perhaps more likely to happen there than anywhere else. If we want to avoid human nature’s worst consequences, we have to work actively against them. That’s why we have strong leadership structures, which hopefully put people who are proven NOT to be tribal in nature into positions of responsibility. It takes hard work and commitment, but I’m grateful for the incredible efforts of all the moderators and council members and leaders in LoCo teams across this huge and wonderful project, for the leadership they exercise in keeping us focused on doing really good work.

It’s hard, but sometimes we have to critique people who are associated with Ubuntu, because they have been tribal. Hell, sometimes I and others have to critique ME for small-minded and tribal thinking. When someone who calls herself “an Ubuntu fan” stands up and slates the work of another distro we quietly reach out to that person and point out that it’s not the Ubuntu way of doing things. We don’t spot them all, but it’s a consistent practice within the Ubuntu leadership team: our values are more important than winning or losing any given debate.

Do not be drawn into a tribal argument on Ubuntu’s behalf

Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It’s sad. It’s not constructive. It’s ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn’t forget. It’s certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be.

I would like to say this to everyone who feels associated with Ubuntu: hold fast to what you know to be true. You know your values. You know how hard you work. You know what an incredible difference your work has made. You know that you do it for a complex mix of love and money, some more the former, others the more latter, but fundamentally you are all part of Ubuntu because you think it’s the most profound and best way to spend your time. Be proud of that.

There is no need to get into a playground squabble about your values, your ethics, your capabilities or your contribution. If you can do better, figure out how to do that, but do it because you are inspired by what makes Ubuntu wonderful: free software, delivered freely, in a way that demonstrates real care for the end user. Don’t do it because you feel intimidated or threatened or belittled.

The Gregs are entitled to their opinions, and folks like Jono and Dylan have set an excellent example in how to rebut and move beyond them.

I’ve been lucky to be part of many amazing things in life. Ubuntu is, far and away, the best of them. We can be proud of the way we are providing leadership: on how communities can be a central part of open source companies, on how communities can be organised and conduct themselves, on how the economics of free software can benefit more than just the winning distribution, on how a properly designed user experience combined with free software can beat the best proprietary interfaces any day. But remember: we do all of those things because we believe in them, not because we want to prove anybody else wrong.

A big thank you from me to the team who makes it real every week.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 200 for the week June
27 – July 3rd, 2010.

The purpose of this newsletter is to let everyone know what is
happening in all the different corners of the vast Ubuntu community.
It’s a snapshot of the Ubuntu Community one week at a time.

The first issue was unleashed June 4th, 2006, and a little over four
(4) years and seven (7) releases later UWN and the Ubuntu Community
continues to mature and grow together.

The Ubuntu News Team, which includes both UWN and Fridge, continues to
report what happens, effects, and relates to the the vast and ever
growing Ubuntu community, including information from the different
teams, LoCos, forums, mailing lists, IRC universe, and newsworthy
press coverage and blogs. A very important and helpful contribution
many LoCo Teams continue to do is spread the news by translating UWN.

It has undoubtedly been a fun and rewarding experience for all involved!

We would like to thank all our readers for your continued support and
feedback and encourage you to keep sending the Ubuntu News Team your
comments and corrections (yes, we do make mistakes!).

The fruit of that R&D is both a new desktop experience codebase, called Unity, and a range of Light versions of Ubuntu, both netbook and desktop, that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios.

The dual-boot, web-focused use case is sufficiently different from general-purpose desktop usage to warrant a fresh look at the way the desktop is configured. We spent quite a bit of time analyzing screenshots of a couple of hundred different desktop configurations from the current Ubuntu and Kubuntu user base, to see what people used most. We also identified the things that are NOT needed in lightweight dual-boot instant-on offerings. That provided us both with a list of things to focus on and make rich, and a list of things we could leave out.

Instant-on products are generally used in a stateless fashion. These are “get me to the web asap” environments, with no need of heavy local file management. If there is content there, it would be best to think of it as “cloud like” and synchronize it with the local Windows environment, with cloud services and other devices. They are also not environments where people would naturally expect to use a wide range of applications: the web is the key, and there may be a few complementary capabilities like media playback, messaging, games, and the ability to connect to local devices like printers and cameras and pluggable media.

We also learned something interesting from users. It’s not about how fast you appear to boot. It’s about how fast you actually deliver a working web browser and Internet connection. It’s about how fast you have a running system that is responsive to the needs of the user.

Unity: a lightweight netbook interface

There are several driving forces behind the result.

The desktop screenshots we studied showed that people typically have between 3 and 10 launchers on their panels, for rapid access to key applications. We want to preserve that sense of having a few favorite applications that are instantly accessible. Rather than making it equally easy to access any installed application, we assume that almost everybody will run one of a few apps, and they need to switch between those apps and any others which might be running, very easily.

We focused on maximising screen real estate for content. In particular, we focused on maximising the available vertical pixels for web browsing. Netbooks have screens which are wide, but shallow. Notebooks in general are moving to wide screen formats. So vertical space is more precious than horizontal space.

We also want to embrace touch as a first class input. We want people to be able to launch and switch between applications using touch, so the launcher must be finger friendly.

Those constraints and values lead us to a new shape for the desktop, which we will adopt in Ubuntu’s Netbook Edition for 10.10 and beyond.

First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications. That frees up vertical space for web content, at the cost of horizontal space, which is cheaper in a widescreen world. In Ubuntu today the bottom panel also presents the Trash and Show Desktop options, neither of which is relevant in a stateless instant-on environment.

Second, we’ll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly. With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, we can afford to be more generous with the icon size there. The Unity launcher will show what’s running, and support fast switching and drag-and-drop between applications.

Third, we will make the top panel smarter. We’ve already talked about adopting a single global menu, which would be rendered by the panel in this case. If we can also manage to fit the window title and controls into that panel, we will have achieved very significant space saving for the case where someone is focused on a single application at a time, and especially for a web browser.

We end up with a configuration like this:

Mockup of Unity Launcher and Panel with maximised application

The launcher and panel that we developed in response to this challenge are components of Unity. They are now in a state where they can be tested widely, and where we can use that testing to shape their evolution going forward. A development milestone of Unity is available today in a PPA, with development branches on Launchpad, and I’d very much like to get feedback from people trying it out on a netbook, or even a laptop with a wide screen. Unity is aimed at full screen applications and, as I described above, doesn’t really support traditional file management. But it’s worth a spin, and it’s very easy to try out if you have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed already.

Ubuntu Light

Instant-on, dual boot installations are a new frontier for us. Over the past two years we have made great leaps forward as a first class option for PC OEM’s, who today ship millions of PC’s around the world with Ubuntu pre-installed. But traditionally, it’s been an “either/or” proposition – either Windows in markets that prefer it, or Ubuntu in markets that don’t. The dual-boot opportunity gives us the chance to put a free software foot forward even in markets where people use Windows as a matter of course.

And it looks beautiful:

Ubuntu Light, showing the Unity launcher and panel

In those cases, Ubuntu Netbook Light, or Ubuntu Desktop Light, will give OEM’s the ability to differentiate themselves with fast-booting Linux offerings that are familiar to Ubuntu users and easy to use for new users, safe for web browsing in unprotected environments like airports and hotels, focused on doing that job very well, but upgradeable with a huge list of applications, on demand. The Light versions will also benefit from the huge amount of work done on every Ubuntu release to keep it maintained – instant-on environments need just as much protection as everyday desktops, and Ubuntu has a deep commitment to getting that right.

The Ubuntu Light range is available to OEM’s today. Each image will be hand-crafted to boot fastest on that specific hardware, the application load reduced to the minimum, and it comes with tools for Windows which assist in the management of the dual-boot experience. Initially, the focus is on the Netbook Light version based on Unity, but in future we expect to do a Light version of the desktop, too.

Given the requirement to customise the Light versions for specific hardware, there won’t be a general-purpose downloadable image of Ubuntu Light on ubuntu.com.

Evolving Unity for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10

Unity exists today, and is great for the minimalist, stateless configurations that suit a dual-boot environment. But in order embrace it for our Netbook UI, we’ll need to design some new capabilities, and implement them during this cycle.

Those design conversations are taking place this week at UDS, just outside Brussels in Belgium. If you can’t be there in person, and are interested in the design challenges Unity presents for the netbook form factor, check out the conference schedule and participate in the discussion virtually.

The two primary pieces we need to put in place are:

• Support for many more applications, and adding / removing applications. Instant-on environments are locked down, while netbook environments should support anybody’s applications, not just those favored in the Launcher.
• Support for file management, necessary for an environment that will be the primary working space for the user rather than an occasional web-focused stopover.

We have an initial starting point for the design, called the Dash, which presents files and applications as an overlay. The inspiration for the Dash comes from consoles and devices, which use full-screen, media-rich presentation. We want the Dash to feel device-like, and use the capabilities of modern hardware.

The Unity Dash, showing the Applications Place

The instant-on requirements and constraints proved very useful in shaping our thinking, but the canvas is still blank for the more general, netbook use case. Unity gives us the chance to do something profoundly new and more useful, taking advantage of ideas that have emerged in computing from the console to the handheld.

Relationship to Gnome Shell

Unity and Gnome Shell are complementary for the Gnome Project. While Gnome Shell presents an expansive view of how people work in complex environments with multiple simultaneous activities, Unity is designed to address the other end of the spectrum, where people are focused on doing one thing at any given time.

Unity does embrace the key technologies of Gnome 3: Mutter, for window management, and Zeitgeist will be an anchor component of our file management approach. The interface itself is built in Clutter.

The design seed of Unity was in place before Gnome Shell, and we decided to build on that for the instant-on work rather than adopt Gnome Shell because most of the devices we expect to ship Ubuntu Light on are netbooks. In any event, Unity represents the next step for the Ubuntu Netbook UI, optimised for small screens.

The Ubuntu Netbook interface is popular with Gnome users and we’re fortunate to be working inside an open ecosystem that encourages that level of diversity. As a result, Gnome has offerings for mobile, netbook and desktop form factors. Gnome is in the lucky position of having multiple vendors participating and solving different challenges independently. That makes Gnome stronger.

Relationship to FreeDesktop and KDE

Unity complies with freedesktop.org standards, and is helping to shape them, too. We would like KDE applications to feel welcome on a Unity-based netbook. We’re using the Ayatana indicators in the panel, so KDE applications which use AppIndicators will Just Work. And to the extent that those applications take advantage of the Messaging Menu, Sound Indicator and Me Menu, they will be fully integrated into the Unity environment. We often get asked by OEM’s how they can integrate KDE applications into their custom builds of Ubuntu, and the common frameworks of freedesktop.org greatly facilitate doing so in a smooth fashion.

Looking forward to the Maverick Meerkat

It will be an intense cycle, if we want to get all of these pieces in line. But we think it’s achievable: the new launcher, the new panel, the new implementation of the global menu and an array of indicators. Things have accelerated greatly during Lucid so if we continue at this pace, it should all come together. Here’s to a great summer of code.

Our focus on netbooks has driven much of the desktop design work at Canonical. There are a number of constraints and challenges that are particular to netbooks, and often constraints can be a source of insight and inspiration. In this case, wanting to make the most of vertical space has driven the decision to embrace the single menu approach.

It’s all about vertical pixels

Netbooks are conventionally small-and-wide-screen devices. A common screen format is 1024×600. There’s plenty of horizontal space, but not a lot of vertical space. So we’ve been lead to explore options that really make the most of the vertical space.

This is important because the main thing people do with a netbook is surf the web. And most pages will fit horizontally in a netbook screen, but they require quite a lot of vertical scrolling. The more we can optimise the use of vertical space, the more enjoyable it will be to spend time on the web, with your netbook.

In the first few iterations of Ubuntu’s netbook-oriented UI, we concentrated on collapsing the window title into the top panel. In 10.10, we’re going to put the menu there.

Only on the Netbook Edition UI

We’re going to put the menu in the panel on the netbook edition of Ubuntu, and not on the desktop edition, because that’s where the screen real-estate is most precious. There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart. Those questions are greatly diminished in the netbook environment, by definition.

Also, the netbook edition has a reduced application load. That will reduce the number of applications we need to get this working on.

However, it will be straightforward to use this on your desktop too, if you want, and we’d encourage people to try with that configuration. The more testing we have early on, the better we’ll understand how it works with different applications. It will be easy to add to the standard desktop panel for people who want to try it out, or prefer to work that way.

Innovation: combining title and menu in a single panel

It’s not confirmed yet, but we will aim to go beyond what Apple and others have done with panel menus, to consolidate both the window title (and window controls) into the panel along with the menu.

By default, we’d display the contents of the title bar. When you mouse up to the panel, or when you press the Alt key, the contents would switch to the menu. That way, you’re looking at the document title most of the time, unless you move towards it to click on the menu.

In mockups and prototype testing, the result was a leaner, cleaner feeling netbook interface. Less clutter, less wasted space, and improved clarity of purpose. We’ll have to get running code in front of users to evaluate the usability of it and tweak transitions and presentation.

Generally, people use netbooks with a small set of applications running, all maximised. In that case, putting the menu in the panel will save 24 pixels, about 4% of the vertical space. Combined with other work on the netbook interface, we’re confident there is no better OS for surfing the net on your ultra-mobile netbook.

Under the hood: d-bus menu transport

The technical approach we are taking in this work is to build on the d-bus menu work that Cody Russel and Ted Gould have pioneered for our work on indicators.

Essentially, this lets us map a menu into d-bus space, where a different application can take responsibility for rendering it. The technology works across both Gtk and Qt applications, so we are confident that it will work for the common cases of GNOME and KDE apps running on the Ubuntu netbook edition.

Of course, there is a lot of work to be done to support applications that use different toolkits, notably the Mozilla suite of Firefox and Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.

And there will be many applications which need some thought as to how best to map the experience from the current world of “one menu per window” to a single, panel-displayed menu.

We’ve started working on this with the existing Global Menu project. While there are differences in the technical approach we want to take, that team has already identified many of the common issues, and there are great opportunities for us to collaborate. I’m looking forward to seeing the result in action in 10.10!

We have the guiding principle that we should be able to recognize the merits of any kind of contribution, coming from any part of the globe. Whether someone is spending time helping people on IRC, or answering questions in the Forums, or translating Ubuntu into Amharic, or leading local events to raise awareness of Ubuntu, or leading a team that deploy Ubuntu in schools, or building Ubuntu based virtual machines on EC2, or fixing bugs, or triaging bugs, or filing really good bug reports….. contributions of all forms make Ubuntu more useful to a broader audience, and so we set out to recognize them with Membership.

The actual decisions are taken by the Regional Membership Boards. We set up three of them to cover the America’s, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), and Asia-Pacific. People who are seeking membership present their work to the RMB’s, who confer membership on those who they believe have made a “substantial, and sustained” contribution, in any field. We also allow specialist leadership teams to confer membership for contributions in their fields, on the basis that they may have more insight into the dynamics of that particular work.

The RMB’s play a big role in sustaining the culture of Ubuntu, in who and what they recognize and in the advice that they offer applicants.

In order to keep the RMB’s fresh, we renew the membership of the RMB’s on a regular basis. Folks stand for a term, and we seek nominations regularly. Like now

We’re seeking nominations to all three Regional Membership Boards. Ideal candidates have a track record good judgment – and a willingness to support positive contributions matched only by their willingness NOT to be drawn into supporting factions, personalities and cabals. In any community of scale (and Ubuntu is at a larger scale than most) there will always be people making fascinating and unexpected (and hard to evaluate) contributions, as well as people who want to further their own ambitions at the expense of others. Being able to tell the difference, and recognizing those who are going to continue to raise the bar for Ubuntu, is a skill.

If you know someone who does, please seek their assent to nominate them for their Regional Membership Board. You can chat with dholbach on IRC, or mail the RMB’s for further information.

The mails from RMB’s announcing new members are one of the most interesting kinds “pulse” for the project – who’s doing what, where. So I’d like to thank the folks who have lead the RMB’s over the past cycle, and say again how much I appreciate their work!

1. Notifications are “awareness distilled” in the sense that you cannot interact with them at all.  We designed them as ephemeral “click-transparent” messages, implemented in Notify-OSD. Their sole purpose is to notify you of transient events.
2. Indicator Menus combine persistent awareness of a state with a set of options for modifying that state.

In this blog I’ll outline the arc of our work on indicator menus to date, and the trajectory we expect it to follow. We’re about a year into the effort, all told, and I think it will take another 18 months before we can consider it baked. It should be done by 12.04 LTS. This is an iterative process, and things are in flux right now. I hope, when we are happy that we can commit to ABI stability, that Gnome and KDE will adopt the work too. For the moment, the rapid pace of evolution has meant that we’re depending on fantastic upstreams to keep up with us as things move.

Goals of the Ayatana Indicators

The indicators are designed to create a persistent awareness of state, or an awareness of a persistent state. They complement notifications: they are persistent, when notifications are ephemeral. You might miss a notification, but you should always be able to check your indicators. You can interact with indicators, using their menus, in contrast with the un-clickable notifications.

We value:

• Support for both GNOME and KDE. Both desktop environments are important in Ubuntu. We encourage the teams to reflect a pure vision of each, but it’s also the case that users will want to run a GNOME application on Kubuntu occasionally, or vice versa. So we have to make sure the work is considered from the perspectives of developers on either side, and we have to provide APIs and libraries that work in both environments.
• Accessibility. Indicators are critical elements of awareness. Whether you are connected, what the time is, whether you are online, whether your battery will last long enough for you to finish your work, whether you have messages… these are all vital to a complete computing experience. We have to make sure that visual and other disabilities can be addressed.
• Familiarity and Innovation. As always, these are in tension with one another. Innovation helps us put free software at the front of the curve, but it creates the risk of breaking people’s habits and expectations.
• Consistency and Usability. We want the end result to be more usable in the whole, and we are willing to lose individual nuggets if that helps make the whole more valuable.
• Streamlining. There are too many indicators, that aren’t clear enough about their intent. There are also many indicators from different applications which do roughly the same thing, but in slightly different ways. The value of all the indicators is enhanced if there are fewer of them, and they are more obvious to discover and use.

Some firm decisions

Those values lead us to some anchor decisions:

1. D-Bus for communications. A messaging approach makes it straightforward to adopt consistent patterns across different desktop environments. We will provide wrapper libraries for both Gtk and Qt applications to access the indicator capabilities. A Qt application running on Ubuntu should “feel native” when it’s using indicators correctly. And vice-versa. The messaging approach also lets us handle accessibility in a better way: we don’t have to accommodate every possible disability visually, because we can have agents that interpret the indicator messages and handle it in ways that are appropriate for a particular disability.
2. Opinionated placement. We will place all indicators at the top right of the screen on GNOME. We’ll place them in a particular order, too, with the “most fundamental” indicator, which controls the overall session, in the top right. The order will not be random, but predictable between sessions and screen sizes. There will be no GUI support for users to reorder the indicators.
3. Constrained behaviour. All the indicators will take the form of an indicator (icon or text), and a menu. Clicking on an indicator will open its menu. Keyboard navigation will always work, and left and right arrows will translate either into submenu navigation or flipping from indicator to indicator. The whole set of indicators on the panel will be navigable as a single menu, in essence. We won’t support “right click” on indicators differently from “left click”, and there’ll be no ability for arbitrary applications to define arbitrary behaviours to arbitrary events on indicators.
4. Symbolic visuals. We want to pare back the visual representation of status presented by the icons. We don’t believe that visual accessibility for the disabled need drive the design of the standard icon set, as there will be both alternative icons, renderings, and entirely different options such as speech or custom devices to handle those. Colors on the indicators should have semantic purpose and be used mainly for alerts and awareness, while the shape of the icon should define its purpose.

The first part of our work was pure housekeeping. The panel in Ubuntu is very generic, it lets you put all sorts of different gadgets in all sorts of different places, and those gadgets can behave in all sorts of different ways. The result has been to stimulate innovation, but it has also made the panel very inconsistent and ultimately less useful.

We reviewed the way Ubuntu-specific applications were using the panel, and set out to clean them up. Update-manager lost its persistent notification in favour of the more direct popup window. Others will follow.

We decided to introduce a new gadget on the panel which would be a container for all the indicators which follow our new Ubuntu Ayatana pattern. And we started work on a set of indicators that would fit inside that container. Thus far, we’ve done the session, “me”, and sound indicators.

We also created a framework for applications which want to display their own indicator. That’s the AppIndicators work, which has been fantastically lead in 10.04 LTS by Jorge Castro, coordinating with many upstreams to ensure that their applications feel tightly integrated into the panel.

The icon visual design turned into a conversation about “-symbolic” icons at UDS in Dallas, and is now being realised in the ubuntu-mono icon theme in 10.04 LTS. There is work under way to make symbolic icons a more formal and rigorous construct that can be themed, and we’ll participate in that effort or offer an alternative implementation.

9 parts perspiration, 1 part innovation

The detailed design of a large set of systemic indicators, together with the work to make them all look, feel and behave in a consistent fashion, has been substantial effort involving MPT, Ted Gould, Cody Russell and many others. There’s still a lot of work to do. Conor Curran and Kalle Valo joined the team in this latest cycle. There is a great deal that remains to be done.

We also aspire to introduce some new and innovative concepts.

Category Indicators

In order to reduce the number of indicators and improve the persistence and usefulness of the indicators that remain, we’ve introduced the idea of “category indicators”. These are indicators into which multiple, similar applications can embed themselves. Instead of having a different indicator each application, we have one indicator for the whole category.

The messaging indicator, which aggregates awareness about many different types of messages from real people, is an example. Instead of having three different icons for email, IM and Identi.ca or Twitter, Ubuntu has just one messaging indicator, which can make you aware of important messages in any of those applications.

The three default applications for those lines of communication all share the same indicator. They are part of the same category. There are custom API’s for messaging applications which let them:

1. Insert entries in the messaging menu which are displayed even when the application is not running. Useful for helping people go straight to the activity. Instead of having to check if the email client is running, then switching to it or launching it, then going to the message composition window, I should *always* be able to compose a new message with just two clicks, regardless of whether or not the mail client is running initially.
2. Add custom menu entries to the messaging menu that are relevant to them. Each applications gets a “section” in the category indicator menu, and they can add custom menu entries to their section.
3. Register themselves as applications that should be shown in the messaging menu, or remove themselves from that menu. The default applications will show up there unless they are uninstalled or expressly configured not to use the messaging menu. Other applications will put themselves there by default when they are run by that user, who can also configure them not to display there.
4. Show whether they are running, a state which is indicated with a small “play” style triangle next to the application icon in the menu.

There are also some behaviours which are collective across all the applications in the category. For example, any of the applications can set the messaging indicator to an alert state, signalling that it’s worth clicking on.

Each category indicator supports a unique API that’s relevant for that category. There are some common features, for example the ability of applications to register and de-register for the indicators and the ability to add menu entries, but the details might vary substantially from one category to another.

The underlying goal is to make it clearer to users “what all of those icons are about”. There are fewer of them, and the ones that are there are more persistent – they are always there, and they always do the same sort of thing. “You’ve got a message” is useful no matter which channel the message came through. The net result is that the whole set of indicators feels tighter and better defined.

The session indicator, which displays the shutdown / restart menu, has a similar capability that replaced the “restart required” panel icon in 10.04 LTS. Since the session menu already contains the “restart” menu option, the session menu will now be set into an alert state when you need to restart. The “Restart…” menu option is changed to “Restart Required…” (though I would now prefer something like “Restart, completing updates…”).

The battery indicator shows the status of all of your batteries, from laptop to UPS to mouse and wireless keyboard. Other applications and devices which have battery information should be able to insert themselves there appropriately.

Similarly, all the calendar and alarm applications might fit into the Clock Indicator. And perhaps all the applications which have downloads might use a single category for that – there’s some discussion along those lines on the Ayatana list at the moment.

Timelines and iterations

The basic “add an indicator with a menu” capability is there now, and was used for Application Indicators in 10.04 LTS.

What complicates the picture from a delivery perspective is our evolving understanding of how best to organise the category indicators. For example, at the moment we are aggregating received messages in the messaging indicator, but the send or broadcast elements of those same communications channels are accessed through the Me menu, where we track presence. That has been controversial – sensible folks think we should perhaps restructure that to bring the elements together.

Each arrangement of category indicators involves shaping the API’s in new ways, because the categories are fundamentally different from one another, and we want to design custom indicators for each category. Not only are the individual category indicator designs changing, but the arrangement of categories themselves is subject to active debate and experimentation, which is important to getting a crisp final result.

We can’t be certain that the current configuration is the best one, and want the flexibility to continue to evolve and reshape the APIs accordingly. We expect it will take at least three iterations of Ubuntu to be certain, and that we can commit to ABI stability for 12.04 LTS onwards.