We've been in a controlled beta of Ubuntu One now for a little more than a month. Recently, I've been hacking on the client a fair bit, porting our Nautilus extension to C, to avoid the dependency on python-nautilus, and for the extension to perform better, and not slow down desktop start up times by loading up Python. As part of this, the build system for ubuntuone-client was switched over to autotools for most stuff. We still generate a setup.py, and use it to perform a few tasks, but that should be going away soon as well. Keeping it around requires some funky magic in the build system, to pull all the necessary pieces into a release tarball correctly, and get Python pieces installed to the system. But now we have a way to build reproducible tarballs, and should be doing regular releases on Launchpad. You can find them here:

Ubuntu One Storage Protocol

Ubuntu One Client

We encourage people to build packages for their favorite distros as well, and are glad to answer any questions about how things should be packaged. If you have any questions, feel free to come bug us in #ubuntuone on FreeNode (irc.freenode.net). Enjoy!

So, I just got my Pre yesterday, and was messing about with copying some of my more important contacts over (until my new Laptop arrives, and I can use Vista to copy the rest over from my older Win Mobile phone), and noticed that the Pre doesn't save commas in contact entries. After no luck searching through the manual, or with a search of the internets, I ended up calling Sprint's customer support. Apparently, I'm the first person to call about this issue, and so nobody could help really, though it was suggested to possibly call Palm directly. So I went back to do a little searching, and found some references to using the 'p' or 'w' characters to mean pause/wait on other phones. Not exactly the results I was hoping for, but inserting a 'p' does let me store the bit of information I need in the contact entry, and use it in the dialer. It simply does a 'wait for input' type of thing, and appends a button for the next sequence of numbers to dial, which must be manually 'pressed' during the call. At least it will let me still use conference numbers at least somewhat more easily than remembering the PIN myself.

Some people like to live in dreams. Others like to live like those dreams can never be real. I like to make them come to life.

I've mentioned in a couple place recently that I'd been working on some mock-ups of a new interface for contacts management. I'm finally posting them here now, and hope I can figure out some of the details for getting it implemented, soon. The idea is to provide a very simple interface, and extra information about a user, which one wouldn't normally find in the address book interface. I also want to get rid of the concept of having sepparate "address books" that you manage separately from your actual contacts, that may even have the same contact in multiple places.

This is the simple list view for the contacts. Not sure what would belong in all the menus, or if it should even have any, yet. The current tool bar items are new contact, return to list view (would be greyed out in the view), and a combo box to filter the list. Filtering would work based on which store the contact is in, tags on the contact, names, status, and all the information assosiated with a contact, so it would pretty much be a "do what i mean" sort of interface. The content associated with the contacts, which ends up in the list view, is also not entirely specified, nor is the context menu which would pop up when right clicking. Opening a contact would use some neat clutter-like animation sequence and bring you to the Contact view:

Not entirely sure what the layout should be like exactly, as some of the things would require scrolling. Probably will just have one scrollbar for the whole canvas, and just overflow vertically where needed. Here the new contact item would be disabled in the toolbar, but I think the filter entry might be still useful, for condensing the information displayed for a contact. Typing "phone" to show only the contact's phone number information, for example. We could display a lot of information for a contact here, such as RSS feed data, flickr posts, related contacts, and similar things from web services. I want to find a nice balance and show the most pertinent information in the prominent top portion of the canvas though, such as useful free/busy agenda information, basic contact info, status, presence, and contact store locations.

This contacts UI is a small part of a much larger project I've been talking with some other hackers with, to unify the backends, and an access API, for getting at all this information, to really make people and relationships a first class part of the desktop. More news coming soon on that.

Ubuntu One is now in a limited public beta. Check it out. There will be lots more awesome stuff on it in the future too.

After a short discussion, Danilo and I have agreed that moving intltool to Launchpad would be better for the project, and us, as its maintainers. The project is not specific to GNOME, and we would like to encourage non-GNOME projects to adopt it for use by their translators. All future development will take place in the LP project, with Danilo and myself as its continuing maintainers. Please report any new bugs or requests in the bug tracker on Launchpad. I will be sending a mail shortly to the appropriate GNOME lists, with some more details soon. If you have any questions about how this will affect you, feel free to e-mail me or ping me on IRC.