Canonical hires for Apple-beating Ubuntu

 

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Posted on 12 Sep 2008 at 08:33

Canonical is hiring a team to make the Ubuntu desktop more usable and aesthetically more pleasing.

The announcement follows Canonical-founder Mark Shuttleworth's rallying call at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, in which he argued that Linux desktops should have "a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years."

Speaking on his blog, Shuttleworth argues that the freedom of open-source developers "to scratch their own itch" when it comes to creating applications means that user interfaces are "patchy and inconsistent".

He points specifically to Firefox, Gnome and OpenOffice, all of which offer their own UI toolkits, making it difficult to create a seamless experience between the three.

"When you present yourself on the web, you have 15 seconds to make an impression, so aspiring champions of the web 2.0 industry have converged on a good recipe for success: Make your site visually appealing; do something different and do it very, very well; call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience," writes Shuttleworth.

"We need the same urgency, immediacy and elegance as part of the free software desktop experience... We are hiring designers, user experience champions and interaction design visionaries and challenging them to lead not only Canonical's distinctive projects but also to participate in GNOME, KDE and other upstream efforts to improve FLOSS usability."

Author: Stuart Turton