Matthew Paul Thomas

Many open-source software developers use GitHub. Let’s make it as easy as possible for them to build and release their code automatically.

The design process for System Settings on the phone involved a competitor evaluation, identifying user journeys, generating many possibilities for the overview screen, and designing many individual settings screens.

To solve a design problem, define the target user, test the existing solution (if any), evaluate alternative solutions, and test with real users. The more of these steps you can follow, the better the results.

For Ubuntu 12.04, we’re planning to merge the user and system menus, make major changes to the messaging menu, introduce a new sync menu, and retire the printing status menu. There are plenty of smaller changes you can help out with, too.

The “Quit” command in applications today is a relic from the days when the original Macintosh had no hard disk and couldn’t multitask. Modern applications have made this command increasingly annoying. Fortunately, though, modern PCs have also made it increasingly unnecessary. Mobile operating systems have, for the most part, eliminated th

We have a list of dozens of Ubuntu programs that use the notification area. What we need now is a description of how each of them use it.

A new keyboard menu will replace both the keyboard layout toggle from Ubuntu’s doomed notification area, and the IBus menu for choosing a keyboard input method.

Using a single menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of separate menu bars inside each window, seems like a pretty simple change. But it’s more complex than it appears, and we’ll need lots of help.

As part of the notification area transition, we’re adapting the Gnome Power Manager item to be a system status menu. We’re interested in your feedback on the design and any improvements we can make.

Ubuntu is phasing out the traditional Gnome notification area, because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification mechanisms instead. Some notification area items will be replaced by various system status menus