When the Ubuntu Phone project was cancelled, I moved to the desktop team. The initial goal for team was to bring up a GNOME 3 based desktop for the Ubuntu 17.10 release that would be familiar to both Ubuntu users coming from the earlier Unity desktop, and users of “vanilla” GNOME 3.

At the end of 2012, I moved from Ubuntu One to the Unity API Team at Canonical. This team was responsible for various services that supported the Unity desktop shell: most noticeably the search functionality. This work initially focused on the Unity 7 desktop shipping with Ubuntu, but then changed focus to the Unity 8 rewrite used by the Ubuntu Phone project.

Ubuntu One was a set of online services provided by Canonical for Ubuntu users. It provided cloud hosted storage for files and structured data, synchronised to the user’s local machine. The Ubuntu One service was discontinued in 2014.

PyGTK is a set of bindings for the GTK widget set. It provides an object oriented interface that is slightly higher level than the C one. It automatically does all the type casting and reference counting that you would have to do normally with the C API.

For more information on PyGTK, see its home page at www.pygtk.org.

From 2004 to 2008, I worked on the Launchpad code hosting site for Canonical. As well as providing hosting for third party Open Source projects, the site is central to the Ubuntu project: doing everything from bug tracking to managing the package repository.

JHBuild is a build script for building GNOME from CVS. Unlike some build scripts, jhbuild makes use of dependency information, so it will only build what is needed to build the packages you want.

Libglade was a library that took user interfaces designed with the GLADE user interface builder, and then instantiated them at runtime.

Fontilus was a set of extensions for the Nautilus file manager, enabling various font management tasks via the fontconfig system.

Nautilus RPM was a set of extensions for the Nautilus file manager to help manage packages on an RPM based system.

Gimp-Python is a package that allows people to write plug-ins for The GIMP in the Python programming language rather than Script-Fu (Scheme), Perl, Tcl or C.

GnoRPM is a graphical front end to the RPM package management system. I was the initial author and maintained it up til the end of 1999 (around the 0.9 release). It shipped as the graphical package manager for Red Hat Linux from versions 6.0 to 7.3.

WWW-SQL is one of the first pieces of free software I wrote, back when I was in university. It is a CGI script that allows simple programs to be embedded in web pages, with access to either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database.