DoctorMo's Blog

Many years ago I produced a short visual guide, well after all the small changes I decided to update the guide from top to bottom. It’s now longer and follows a stronger narrative than before.

This is a long image, for the PDF download here. Repository for the svg files and scripts to build pdf and tiled images here: ~doctormo/understanding-foss/trunk, all Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike.

I’m getting frustrated trying to scroll on pages and I’d like to introduce an idea:

Since we have a full screen app that really is taking up the entire screen, there seems to be a good opportunity to use the screen when an app is maximised to scroll the largest scrollbar in the app. I have no idea how hard it would be to tie the scroll bar into something which could be controlled via the operating system, technical details.

The idea here is to put the top and bottom infinities to use, allowing them to be used to allow easier viewing of the internet. This could obviously be made generic so it could be used to control all kinds of apps (optionally?).

Maybe this kind of thing could be made an extension, something to try out and do some experiments. Maybe others will see it as an essential part of their ubuntu experience.

Your thoughts, as always, welcome below…

Take a look at this video, here I show an awesome new technology for using Clutter/Gtk with Cascading Style Sheets.

Audacious Video

You can test this out for yourself with Ubuntu 12.04 (Beta) using the following:

sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0 gir1.2-gconf-2.0
bzr branch lp:csslavie
cd csslavie
./netbook-launcher.py

Note: default clutter/cogl has a bug which prevents the background’s opacity setting, so you won’t get as cool an effect. But a fixed version of those libraries should be available eventually.

Please comment below what you think.

I wanted to post this wonderful artwork by deviantArtist iNOE:

It depicts Ubuntu with Unity using multi-monitors. Hopefully a feature that will be polished and ready to go by April. Keep up the good work community!

I think Randall might be onto something with the “two word” Ubuntu branding idea.

This week Michael Hall wrote a blog post about his foray into writing a new Dictionary Lens for Unity. It’s a lens that I would find most useful but until it’s packages I used the screenshots as a guide to how it would look.

I thought about how you would use the icon space to illustrate something useful about the words and definitions being shown. I thought that the type of the word is often not understood or remembered when looking up a word and often find myself reading over the abbr. italics. So I thought, how would you go about developing symbols for the concepts of word types?

In a fit of inkscape drafting, I put together a few concepts without colours and an open question to those interested; how would you iconify a concept?

Your comments below…

There are so many people in Ubuntu who do such marvelous work all the time. I’d like to thank every one of you wonderful hard working bunnies.

My special shout out has to go to a tour-de-force in Ubuntu passion, stead fast community support and on going involvement in any and all LoCo teams she’s within ten miles of. Of course I’m talking about Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2). Thank you pleia2 for your wonderful involvement and may we benifit from your wisdom for many years to come.

Note: I know I’m not terribly good at capturing people yet, but with practice I can get better, if you’d like to be a test model, send me a message and I will sketch away.

First with Gimp:

Then in Inkscape:

Just caught this artwork on deviantArt:

Interesting, isn’t it.

Here is a wonderful picture of my with my new daughter Violet wearing the Ubuntu Onesie her Auntie Sarah shipped from the UK.

I didn’t intend to be wearing the Debian tshirt, makes it weirdly symbolic.

I also just noticed the bowler in the background.