The Evil Blog

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