I’ve been using the new wallpaper and themes since they were first introduced and I’ve began to love and hate them at the same time. I’ll try to explain why.

<rant>

The theme that I’m using of the two is called Ambiance (the other is Radiance, which is brighter) and it seems to be the best based on appearance in my opinion.

Ubuntu 10.04 Ambiance

As you can see from the screenshot above (click to view a larger image) the title bars have a smooth gradient touch that even works well with transparency (seen in the windows that aren’t focused).

The window controls have moved to the left-hand side by default and have also been reorganized, which can be task to get used to as I’ve only finally began to feel comfortable with the controls on the left-hand side.

Side note: If you’re interested in easily moving these controls around and re-arranging them, you’re in luck!

I can only imagine that the thought process behind the brainstorming session for the window controls position and layout was something like the following poorly executed logic.

Windows is obviously very popular and people relate to their traditional window controls. We can use alternatives to these so we are “different”: “x” for close, “/\” for maximize, “[]” for restore, and “\/” for minimize. Now we can move the controls to the left side of the window to please all of the apple fans. Save. Commit.

The window controls are probably one of the most important design points to any theme. While it appears that Ubuntu is going for a more polished and professional appearance, its going to be near impossible get the polished feel of Mac OS X and the traditional simplistic controls from Windows to integrate together using the new colors that Mark Shuttleworth and his team have chosen.

Many people across the Ubuntu forums and blogosphere are repeatedly comparing Ubuntu’s new theme designs to Mac OS X. While they are correct in identifying the similarities, they are missing the fact that Mac OS X is a continually highly polished operating system with the user interface being one of the main attractions. Rounded window controls and gradient windows aren’t going to be enough to attract users the way OS X does.

The Ubuntu 10.04 Ambiance window controls don’t even have decent hover effects for the current window (window with the red/orange close button).

I for one want to see uniform and consistent icons for all applications as well as attention to folders, drives/devices and thumbnails on the desktop and in other folders. The default orange folder icons have been around for far too long and are in desperate need of some updates.

Moving on, the scrollbars have very little hover attention. While its generally a good idea to be subtle with interface hovers and interactions, the current implementation seems to harm more than help. Rather than fading darker on hover or introducing a bolder border (as XP does), it simply brightens by minimal amount. This isn’t enough visual confirmation to assure the user that they are indeed interacting with the scrollbar.

The scrollbar up, down, left and right arrows have absolutely no hover or press affects. This is a major interface failure and I assume it will eventually be corrected before the theme is finalized. Until then, its a major bug in my opinion.

The buttons. If you look at the screenshot again (from above) you’ll notice how boring and unimpressive the new buttons are (apparently I’m not alone). One thing that I’m impressed with is the was they’ve created a common design between fixed combo boxes and buttons. While the general design of the buttons is just not impressive at all, the thought behind consistency here impresses me.

What doesn’t impress me is the choice of colors for selected and enabled controls..

Window controls (buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, tabs, etc)

Highlighted button example

To me, this idea that purple and orange are going to be widely accepted among new and current users is just absurd.

I’m sure many people tend to just deal with skins and themes rather than trying to find alternatives that are more friendly. I find that I never need to adjust themes in Windows or Mac, but Linux themes seem to have a history of being poorly designed or poorly executed.

I can see how making the Terminal transparent can be attractive to users who know how to even open it, but what were they thinking when they decided to make it purple?

Seriously? A Purple Terminal Window? WTF?

Anyone serious about Linux is going to be using the terminal. Even those who are not so serious about Linux will be subject to opening the terminal to enter obscure commands as solutions to problems that they don’t remotely understand.

I just don’t see purple being as commonly accepted among the male user-group as I do among the female user-group for integration into the default theme. The point in that being that the themes should be more gender neutral with the purple coloring. Especially in the tooltips, OMG!

Another common complaint that I’ve seen among fellow Ubuntu users (and a recent blog post) is the default title bar font which is very bold and not very attractive. One thing I wish they would adopt from Mac is the use of text shadow. In CSS this would simply be something like “text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px #ccc;“. Mac OS X uses a brighter shadow to enhance the appearance of the title bar font in a very slight and elegant way.

While this is a major change from the previous default Human theme, Ubuntu still presents itself as unpolished and unprofessional. Developing a truly unique and efficient interface is without a doubt a difficult task. The previous interface promises that were abandoned are proof of that. However, the importance of introducing a polished interface can’t be stressed enough.

Developing a truly polished interface takes time. This is one thing that is not on Ubuntu’s side with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, which is to include the new theme, scheduled for April 29, 2010 (less than 2 months away).

What they should have done is start this new theme back in the developmental process of Karmic and only installed it through the community-themes package. This would allow people to easily test the theme and provide a fair amount of time to turn feedback into progress. If they had followed this model, the new themes would be very matured by now and especially by the final release of Lucid.

While the final release may produce a polished set of new themes for Lucid, just remember that they could have been (read: should have been) more polished and thought out.

</rant>

In case you were interested in seeing the Radiance theme..

Ubuntu 10.04 Radiance

While there are many other flaws that I’ve encountered in the new themes, the ones mentioned above are in my opinion the ones that are most important. If you’ve got opinions about the new themes, voice your opinions and share your ideas!

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How does this help you? Well, I’ll explain soon, but if you’re downloading a file that someone else has already downloaded and synced with Dropbox then it helps you tremendously!

Basically, Dropbox checks to see if anyone has previously uploaded the exact same file in the past. If they have then you’re in luck!

If the md5 hash matches (I’m purely guessing that they use md5 since it’s the commonly accepted standard for file checking) then they simply “copy n’ paste” what someone else has already uploaded into your personal upload space!

This means that the 347mb file that you want to sync could take 10 seconds to be synced with your account even over a dial-up connection if someone else has already taken the time to upload it for the first time!

If you’re the first person to upload your file then you will certainly have to wait the due time for a proper upload, so don’t expect it with every file.

This is an ingenious move by the Dropbox team as it saves them tons of much needed bandwidth performance and instead pushes the workload to the server side “copy n’ paste” routine…which will perform much faster than your dial-up or simple broadband connection.

Imagine the speed of uploading a 10mb file to Dropbox verses copying that same file from one folder on your hard drive to another folder on your hard drive. That is similar to the performance that you can expect.

It also obviously saves you time since you can sometimes drag n’ drop a large file…blink…then it’s done.

Don’t worry, your files are safe. Chances are slim that someone will upload a file that matches yours in filename and md5 hash code, …but it could happen.

It’s been proven that the md5 hash is insecure, but the chances of someone uploading a file that is recognized as one of yours is very very…(repeat as needed)…very slim.

Honestly, the biggest thing to worry about is the fact that if you delete a private file, someone else could happen to upload a file matching the filename and md5 hash and automatically have access to a file that you uploaded ages ago.

I’m current unaware of how long Dropbox caches the files that you store using their service, but I know that some files that I’ve uploaded in the past and deleted now have been removed from the server…so security is fairly assuring.

While it’s a little creepy and it sounds dangerous….it’s highly improbable.

On the Dropbox teams side, saving bandwidth means that you have that much extra bandwidth to upload content that you need sync’d. Bandwidth is very important these days especially considering that many of us are uploading videos (whether they be family or leisure) and music. Many of these files can range from 3mb for music up to 10gb for video (and blu-ray will bring even higher filesizes ).

Of the sync services that I’ve used (and it’s been a lot so far), Dropbox is by far the front runner. With the features that they offer that you’re not normally aware of, they already pass up the competition hands down. That’s just my own personal opinion.

I’m currently on the free service (2gb), but I would highly suggest that you purchase their pay-for service that gives you up to 50gb of online storage if you’re one to upload a lot or need a lot on the go.

At the very least give them a try and download the Dropbox application. I’m sure anyone could take advantage of the free 2gb package that they offer online to backup important documents or whatever it may be.

Rest assured that if you’re using Dropbox then you’re also using one of the best available sync services to be established thus far! Free space never hurt anyone.

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I look forward to testing the Official Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha release on Tuesday, December 22. However, until then I’ll be digging through this leaked version.

Note that Opera has officially warned against installing such leaked builds, stating that the official release will be “much better and you don’t risk getting nasty trojans on you pc.”

Here are some screenshots I’ve taken. I don’t cover everything, but just enough to give you a good idea of what we should be expecting. I also won’t be detailing all of these pictures, but a picture is worth a thousand words right? Inspect them and see what you can find!

I did notice a lot of skin changes and a couple of bugs here and there dealing with the skin, but it’s overall very much improved. The internal “opera:*” pages also seem to be using a different style than previous builds, but then again they may have dropped using the Opera logo in the top of the pages.

Notice the border-radius support!

Try this build at your own risk!
http://rapidshare.com/files/323481638/Opera_1050_20192_in.msi
http://depositfiles.com/files/e01z2q5qp

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Using Jing, you are able to quickly capture a screenshot of a specific window or a pesky little software bug in action, upload it to an online source and paste the link all within a matter of seconds!

If you can’t capture what you’re looking for in a simple image, you might like the option to capture a video of what you are doing on your desktop and share a link to that instead!

To use Jing, you simply select it from the top of your screen (where it waits by default) and click capture. You’re then given a selection tool that allows you to pick to screen space that you want to capture….nothing more, nothing less. After selection the area that you want to capture, you simply specify if it’s for an image or for a video.

If you click image, you will have your capture almost immediately  and can pick where to store it! If you select video, you will have 3 seconds to prepare your cursor or anything else you need to do. After the count down, video recording begins. Simply click the stop button when you’re finished and pick a source to upload to!

One feature that I’ve only just started using is the FTP option to upload my captures to kyleabaker.com! Thus far, I’ve used Jing to capture tons of bugs that would have otherwise been nearly impossible to capture.

Aside from the slightly noticeable resource usage and slight hang when it’s first activated, Jing is an excellent tool that I would suggest to anyone who needs to capture a visual from your computer screen!

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What’s great about this little webcam is that it has an excellent turning radius and can tilt to just about any angle you need it to.

Another great feature that this webcam offers is the ability to be mounted are rest just about anywhere. The base of the camera opens if you need to hang it somewhere rather than resting it on your desk or tower. The clip can be used to mount it onto your desktop monitor whether it’s an old CRT or a new LCD and it even mounts on very sturdy to my HP Pavilion dv4000 laptop screen.

The picture quality of this little camera is great. Not surprisingly, you can pay a little more and get even better cameras such as the VX-3000 or the VX-6000.

With a built-in microphone, I was able to give away my old microphone and maintain the same capabilities.

My only complaint is that the focus ring around the lens was never mentioned on or in the packaging so it took me a little while to figure out how to get rid of the blur (just rotate the lens to adjust).

The camera even offers a one-click access button on the top of it that can launch video calls instantly for Windows Live Messenger. I don’t use Windows Live Messenger much myself (read: at all), but I figured I could play around with the drivers in a hex editor and figure out how to make the button customizable…maybe open the Digsby or Trillian contact list (who knows) so I wrote an application to make this button customizable.

I had plug-and-play luck in Windows 7 with this webcam, however, Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 has been less than forgiving. I’ve been searching around for a little while trying to configure my webcam that seems to be detected, but the video that’s displayed is corrupt. It seems that it’s a small problem with a fairly easy fix, but I just haven’t found it yet. At least it’s recognized! Hopefully I can write a script or a guide to get this webcam working in Ubuntu for others…once I get it working for myself of course.

If you’ve been looking for a webcam and debating whether or not to buy one then I would suggest this one. It’s affordable, has everything you need and extremely good picture quality!

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First of all, Boxee is a media player that is being developed for multiple platform use. It’s not restricted to videos and is able to stream music from Pandora as well as Last.fm.

One of the first things that I noticed upon registering for Boxee (which is free) was that it is currently only available for Mac and Ubuntu. A Windows version is in development, however, it’s not currently possible to get an install of the alpha/beta Windows builds.

To further disappoint me just a bit, I found that the installers for Ubuntu were for 32-bit machines only. fortunately there is that geeky thing you can do called “force-architecture” or “force-all”.

After using my online best friend (Google) I was able to come across several guides for installing Boxee on Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit. Some of them were correct and some of them weren’t. Some of them were scattered and unorganized and…well…none of them were pathetically easy to follow.

That’s why you’re here.

If you want to install Boxee on Ubuntu 32-bit, just follow the installation instructions provided after registering. If you’re installing in Ubuntu 64-bit (Jaunty Jackalope I might add) then please continue.

Installation

1. Install “getlibs-all” by downloading it from here and double clicking to install or by copy/pasting the following terminal commands. (More details about getlibs here).
   wget http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
   sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb
2. wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz
3. zcat Packages.gz | grep Filename
4. Make sure that the bold part in the following command matches the file name from the above command (ignoring the jaunty and intrepid folder differences).
   wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
5. sudo dpkg -i –force-all boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
   sudo dpkg -i –force-architecture boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
   
6. The following command may take some time to complete, however, be patient and wait for getlibs to prompt you whether or not to install additional libraries to make Boxee work on your machine. Be sure to answer yes or y.
   getlibs /opt/boxee/Boxee
7. sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

After being patient and completing these (honestly) few steps, you should be able to launch Boxee from the application menu and start enjoying some Internet videos!

For further reading or more detailed/technical instructions please see the source thread of this process.

Also, for the record, Netflix Watch Instantly does not work in Boxee for Ubuntu as far as I can tell (due to the lack of DRM support).

I hope I’ve been able to help in some way. Best of luck with Boxee!

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Trillian gained a great deal of popularity in recent years when Trillian 3 was released and harnessed instant messenger features that had never before been seen.

Today, Cerulean Studios officially removed the restricted access and have made Trillian Astra available to everyone! Just head on over to the download page if you want to check it out!

While Trillian Astra is still not in a final release stage, it should be close enough for you to depend on as your main messenger.

I will be interested to see how Trillian Astra competes with Digsby now that they are both openly available to the masses.

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I must say that I’ve loved the service! I use the Watch Instantly feature daily and get two in the postal mail every 3-4 days!

I recommend it to all of my friends if you don’t have it already. If you’re even the slightest bit tech savvy then you’ll also find that it’s easy to stream movies from Watch Instantly to your television!

My laptop has an S-Video out and my television at home has an S-Video in. If you’re not sure what S-Video is then here’s an image.

The image on the left is the port that you should look for on your television and computer, while the image on the right is the cable that connects the two. You can click on the images to view a larger version.

The only problem that some of you may run into after getting the two connected is figuring out how to switch the computer view to an output source. I won’t go into too much detail on that since there will be far too many computers and layouts for me to cover, but simply put there is typically a button on your keyboard up on the top row that will toggle output sources. You may need to use a key combination such as the function key and the output source key which for me is Fn+F4.

I hope that helps and for those of you who suddenly realized the potential of Netflix (and other video sources such as Hulu), I hope your on your way to streaming more.

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True, it has plenty of stupid moments with stupid humor, but I actually appreciate those scenes.

For a while I was starting to wonder if Adam Sandler was losing his touch, but now that I’ve seen this it takes me back to the days of movies like Billy Madison and Big Daddy!

If you haven’t seen it yet then I would highly suggest it and if we don’t have similar movie tastes then just choose to watch everything that I don’t.

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If someone says that they want a Mac computer and you ask them why then their response (in general) will almost always be that they like the way that it looks. For some people it’s the way that the hardware looks with the white case and backlight feature keyboard, but for others it’s the way the operating system itself looks.

These are the people who should really look into Ubuntu.

Ubuntu doesn’t make hardware and they don’t support a narrow branch of hardware devices the same way that Apple does, but they use a kernel that is supported by open source that allows the operating system to run and function on a variety of machines ranging from outdated 1994 computers to cutting edge 2008-9 computers.

That’s not an exact number so don’t take that literally, but to get the point across I mean to show that the Linux kernel support hardware of all types…even PPC (if you know what that means).

When most people think of Linux or even hear the word Linux they think of the command prompt:

While Linux can be run in command line only mode and be (at most times) more powerful than even Windows, this is not the Linux that is around today.

Ubuntu, which is a specific distribution of Linux — meaning that it’s based on Linux, but looks different than other versions of Linux that you can try, is one of the most user friendly versions of Linux that you could download and install on your computer to date.

Ubuntu has gone out of it’s way to include the latest and greatest that the open source community has to offer and has even simplified the interactiveness of the operating system in ways that only make other distrobutions (explained above) jealous and annoyed.

Some versions of Linux will not be so friendly as to even have a preinstalled instant messenger that (by default) keeps a log of instant message from your friends. This means that when you open the chat window and start a conversation with a friend you can see the history and see what you have talked about in the past. This also means that you can look up what was said even when you are not talking to that particular contact.

This is a very simple change and a very simple idea, but it makes all the difference in making a product intuitive and easy for the end user to use and it works just as you would “expect” it to.

Ubuntu also, only recently, has gone to great lengths to make the appearance of the operating system more appealing to new-comers. With a new theme (most of the good ones will need to be downloaded by downloading the community themes) they are trying to make the platform more comfortable and less confusing.

Linux in general has come a long way since it was first born, but with the help of Ubuntu it is now coming into the mainstream.

If you haven’t looked into it before, you should go to Ubuntu.com, download the operating system, burn it to a CD and install it today! It will not erase your already installed version of Windows or Mac. After installing it, you will be prompted upon starting your computer to start up in Windows or Mac (which ever you already had installed) or Ubuntu so you can keep all of your files that you had before and still install Ubuntu!

I recommend Ubuntu to anyone who is looking for an alternative or curious. If you have any questions (anything at all), feel free to ask!

I currently have Ubuntu and Windows Vista installed on this computer at the same time, but I only boot up into Vista about once a month and that’s only to install updates. Ubuntu is amazing and if you give it a chance then you will quickly find that you’re wasting money by paying for operating systems such as Windows and Mac when you can get the same quality and sometimes more by  installing Ubuntu or other variants of Linux for free!

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