Martin Albisetti

Ubuntu One iphone client, source code released

beuno — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:45:42 +0000

We should have released the source for the iphone client right after we did the upload to the appstore, but a bunch of bureaucracy and crazy work deadlines postponed this until now.
We’re going to be doing some work for the Ubuntu 10.10 release on the iphone client as well as on a new Android client, both clients are going to be open source, like all our other Ubuntu One clients.
We’ve created the projects on Launchpad, pushed the initial source code for the iphone client, and will start pushing Android as soon as we get out of the exploration stage.

The projects are available at:

iphone: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-ios-client
android: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-android-client

Stay tuned for more on our new mobile services!

Ubuntu One on mobile for Maverick

beuno — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:01:56 +0000

A few months back the Ubuntu One team launched mobile contacts syncing, our first step into the mobile world. After a few initial rocky Beta days of cleaning up some scaling rough edges, it’s been a smooth ride since. It turned out to be a very popular service, which has us excited, and reinforced our eagerness to build more mobile services for Maverick.
While the full roadmap hasn’t been set in stone yet, we’ve had a lot of feedback about offering a separate, feature-rich mobile service at a lower price, as well as integration into Android.
We’ve decided to take on some of these challenges, and are committed to delivering more and more mobile services, some of which we will introduce around the Ubuntu Maverick release in October.

In the meantime, we’ve decided to extend the 30-day trial period for mobile contact sync until the Maverick release, where we will re-instate it as part of a bigger, juicier and with more native integration, mobile package.

This is effective now, so if you’ve signed up for our paid account exclusively for mobile sync, feel free to downgrade to the free plan, we will notify all mobile users before the 30-day trial is turned on again.

As we finish our research and initial development, we will announce the features that will be rolled out and probably open up for testing in our alpha phase to a small group of lucky people.

It seems to be the case every release, but, the future is exciting!

Looking for an awesome new team member

beuno — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:41:05 +0000

We have very exciting and challenging plans for the future of the new web+mobile Ubuntu One team (more on this soon), and we’re looking for an exceptional web engineer to join us.

The summary for this position is:

We are looking for an exceptional engineer to work on Ubuntu One’s web infrastructure with a proven track record for exceptional problem solving and integration into third-party systems. This person should help the team design, build, and deploy web and mobile applications with a high degree of quality and passion. If you’re the type of person who gets excited about delivering cutting-edge technology to hundreds of thousands of users, in a lean and friendly environment, we are looking for you!

If this sounds like you, check out the full job description and send us your CV!

Ubuntu One contact phone sync, opened again

beuno — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:45:08 +0000

After a few hiccups with our servers, Ubuntu One contact phone sync is open again for new accounts.

Check out the wiki with the instructions to get set up: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/

Sorry for the inconvenience, Slashdot still seems to be a mixed bag of pain and joy

Ubuntu One contacts, now with merging!

beuno — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:49:42 +0000

While we slowly ramp up to release mobile phone contact sync, using my own contacts as test data I realized that once I had merged my phone’s address book and Thunderbird’s address book, I had quite a few contacts duplicated due to them having different names with different information in them. So I had one of those “you know what would be cool…?” kind of moments, and started working on a feature that would let me merge contacts on the web, saving me hours of copy-n-paste.
A few weeks later, an initial pass at that feature has rolled out! Yay agile software development!

There are a few tweaks to the contacts interface, and you will see a new option:

So, for example, let’s pretend you have 2 contacts that are the same person but have an extra name in one of them, one of them has his phone number, the other, his email:

and

We go to our new merge feature and select both of them:

Finally, we get a preview of what this will look like:

Done!

Plans for the future are:

- Allow conflict resolution when the contact has 2 fields that are the same but have different values
- Allow editing the contact in the merge preview
- Allow merging from the contacts page instead of a separate page
- Use this same mechanism when conflicts arise in couchdb merging contacts
Also, contact syncing from thousands of mobile phones will be opened up for a public alpha very very very soon. Stay tuned!

Moving to Ubuntu One

beuno — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:54:07 +0000

After a year and a half in the User Experience team at Canonical, I’ve decided to move to the Ubuntu One team. It’s been an amazing experience to be part of that team but I’ve been missing doing development on a regular basis a lot lately, so I’ve decided to move into a role where I can get my hands dirty more often.

I will start by taking on anything on the web interface together with an amazing team, we will deliver a great experience and a higher level of polish for Lucid. There are some exciting new features coming to Ubuntu One, so it’s a great time to be part of the team, especially with John Lenton and Elliot Murphy as managers.

This does mean I will be moving away from the work I’ve been doing on Launchpad which makes me sad, it’s a fantastic and ambitious project filled with the smartest and most passionate engineers I’ve known.

If in the next few months you don’t start feeling like life is getting better for you on the Ubuntu One web UI, please come and find me and point me and hold me up to my promise of wonderful webby things.

Why test driven development rocks

beuno — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:40:27 +0000

All projects in Canonical have a strong focus on testing. From all of them, I think Bazaar ranks the highest on obsesiveness on testing. As a drive-by contributor, it always felt like a very high entry barrier, and deterred me from getting into complicated changes. It was only after I bit the bullet and got into more complicated changes (in Launchpad, actually) that I understood that tests where my best friends ever. It’s a safety net against myself, and actually lowers the barrier, because I don’t need to know about the rest of the code base to make a change, tests will tell me if I break something (seemingly) unrelated.

On the more extreme side, there is test driven development (TDD). You write the tests first, watch them fail, and then start producing the code that will get them to pass. Having co-authored bzr-upload with the TDD-obsessed bzr developer, Vincent Ladeuil, I thought that if I was going to add a new feature, I may just as well try it (again).

It rocked.

I set up the test, my carrot, and the task went from “start poking around code” to “fix this problem”. With the test written, it became very clear what parts of the code I needed to change, and how the feature had to work.

The results? in one hour, I implemented a feature that lets you ignore specific files on upload. With tests.

Plans for the future of bzr-upload

beuno — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:58:05 +0000

During UDS Vincent and I made sure we shared a room so we could talk a bit about what we wanted for the future of bzr-upload.

To ensure we didn’t loose any of the conversation, he took notes and sent them to me, so now I’m passing them on for those of you interested in contributing or just knowing what features are in the pipeline.
* Create a .bzr-upload-ignore file that ignore any action for which one the paths matches an ignore regexp. Use the working tree version by default, fallback to the versioned one otherwise

* New command: “bzr upload-files FILES” to allow uploading individual files. Upload the specified files if no uncommitted
changes exist, –force overrides the uncommitted changes check.

* New command: “bzr upload-check”. Walk the remote site ensuring that every file still has the same content that the local version –restore optionally restore the remote content to the local value. Optionally for remote sites implementing ssh and providing an md5 binary, the check can be implemented by comparing the local and remote md5 avoiding the full downloads.

Research results on Launchpad icons

beuno — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:16:05 +0000

Following up on our survey on icons in Launchpad, Charline Poirier provides us with the outcome:

Edit : High level of understanding, but a strong association with “attention”, “warning”, and “danger”. Might be worth modifying colour or shape to distance the icon from that interpretation.

Merge : Reasonable understanding of “merge”. However, participants were not entirely sure if the icon referred to the state ‘merged’ or the branches themselves.

Remove : Icon strongly associated with “do not enter” and “delete”. The interpretation “remove” comes only in third place. The icon is strongly evocative and might be better used to designate a more consequential or prohibitive action.

Remote bug : A reasonable percentage of respondents understood the “remote bug” icon. Many, however, did not. It appears that the key for interpreting this icon is the representation of the bug itself. Various potential states of a bug were suggested as interpretations. This icon could be made more explicit.

External link : Relatively well understood. It is worth noting that the icon has powerful suggestion of globality and reach (associated with translation, languages, internationalization, etc). It is a very evocative icon that could be more fully exploited perhaps in another context.

What next? We’ll attempt to create new versions of the icons, run another session of user-testing, and if understanding improves, Launchpad gets new icons \0/

Improving Launchpad icons, round 2

beuno — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:58:34 +0000

Following up on my last post about user testing icons, it has been incredibly successful! We’ve had over 100 responses, and are now going through the data to put together a summary. I will post information on our findings as soon as we finish the work.

In the mean time, Charline Poirier, who is in charge of user testing in our team, has created another survey with 5 more icons to help us get more data. If everyone could give this survey another spin, and create some networking effects to help spread the survey to non-Launchpad users, it would be tremendously helpful to us. Here’s the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6iwthaIT4FwPCsMPa1EDEA_3d_3d