So… What is it that you’re doing again?
It’s now over 4 months since I started at Canonical, so a retrospective blog post might be in order by now 
I will try and keep a not-too-technical tone in this blog post as there seems to be quite a lot of non-technical people reading my blog as well. I’m getting a lot of those “So… What is it that you’re doing again? I don’t understand much from your blog posts”. So here’s to you guys and gals! 
As you may know I spend most of my time here hacking on Unity – a new super shiny user interface for netbooks. So if you wanna be cooler than all your friends you will replace Windows on your netbook with Unity running on Ubuntu, and it will look something like this:
Or view a full screencast I did to demo some of the cool stuff we have been working on (please note that this is the in-development software and not the final product):
Unity Development Demo from Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen on Vimeo.
The code I write runs just below all the fancy graphics you see and wire up all the components and data models that end up as nice little icons on your screen.
So a little more detailed than you might be interested in; these “components and data models” are :
- dee – A system library that enables applications to share small in-memory databases. For tech-savvy people: dee is a library that implements some peer-discovery and peer-to-peer tables over dbus (and lots of nifty helper APIs around this)
- libzeitgeist – A system library that enables applications to talk to a system service called Zeitgeist. The confusing part here is that Zeitgeist is what I develop in my spare time Zeitgeist is a small magical thing that tracks user activity and enables you to search, sort, and categorize everything you do on your computer.
- zeitgeist-fts-extension – Also known as the Zeitgeist Full Text Search Extension. This is an extension module to Zeitgeist that allows you to search your history as you briefly see in the screencast above where I search for “zeit”.
- unity-place-files – A system service that implements all the file searching- and browsing logic in Unity. You can briefly see it in action in the screen that lists all my recent files and where I search for “zeit”. It’s also delivering the all the files and folders you see in the topmost screenshot.
- unity-place-applications – Unsurprisingly much like unity-place-files above, but applies much of the same logic to applications in stead of files
August 15th, 2010 at 15:44
Mikkel you are awesome and thank you for bringing Zeitgeist into Unity
August 15th, 2010 at 18:49
Looks brilliant! great work
August 15th, 2010 at 21:28
Great post! Thanks for the update on how things are going.
I’ve never wanted a netbook, but unity is getting awesome enough that I want to get one for the full experience.
August 15th, 2010 at 23:39
might be a bit off topic, but I see you have multiple workspaces in Unity, is it possible to have different wallpapers on the workspaces for better recognition
August 16th, 2010 at 01:07
I must say that work is great but still the unity is not so great because it brakes lots of basic usability and UI designs by purpose what is to be different than others. There are very few features what other UI’s can not do Out of the Box, but….
But you are doing good job so kudos for that!
August 16th, 2010 at 01:48
Oh, thats what you do!!
This is my superstar husband who talks so excited about his job, that his kids want to go to work with him
August 16th, 2010 at 04:04
I am looking forward to the day where I can apt-get install all this stuff on my debian laptop.
August 16th, 2010 at 05:35
If your kids want to hack on unity, your home must be a great unity too
August 16th, 2010 at 06:34
I’m still rather unsure about the not-a-dock-dock…why no autohide?
August 16th, 2010 at 11:22
I’ve said it before! You are still not serving the masses out there. Don’t ignore the potential of the late majority….
Is lunch nice?
How long do you use for transport?
Can you handle your boss????
August 24th, 2010 at 13:46
I try Unity on my little 10″-netbook- and it’s awesome, intuitive, fast enough, smooth und usable.
But the space the sidebar takes just bothers me on my little screen, especially while surfing in the web. I hope there will be an autohide, like Dante wants it too.
But exept that: great work.
October 14th, 2010 at 00:33
Using unity as I speak and got into it quite fast!
Still I miss a crucial feature, related to unity-place-files. I would like to have an option to exclude certain (ehemmm) files or folders from appearing in this history. In general, any activity that I don’t want popping up while I’m looking for any app or file (or web, as I guess that’s coming too?).
Anyway, I like it. Good work!