Ubuntu App Developer Week kicks off today with a rich set of interesting sessions to showcase and teach how to develop awesome applications on the Ubuntu Platform.

It’s going to be on the #ubuntu-classroom IRC channel on Freenode, during the whole week, so be sure to add it to your calendars. If you can’t make it to a session, don’t worry: there will be logs and session summaries available for you to read and learn on your own time.

16.00 UTC
Enabling Multitouch and Gestures Using uTouch – Chase Douglas and Stephen Webb
Join the future of computing and how humans interact with computers on a daily basis. Multi-touch technologies are the next step in this area, and in this talk Chase and Stephen will show you how your applications can make use of it

17:00 UTC
GObject Introspection: The New Way For Developing GNOME Apps in Python, JavaScript and Others – Tomeu Vizoso
Tomeu says: “The talk will be oriented to developers that use or want to use GNOME technologies and still haven’t fully grasped how GObject Introspection is changing the game. It won’t contain any distro specificities, so join without fear even if you don’t use Ubuntu, if it’s of your interest.  It should be of special interest to those willing to contribute to GNOME Shell or that plan to attend Martin Pitt’s talk about life after PyGTK this Tuesday at 16 UTC

18:00 UTC
From English to any language: internationalizing your apps – David Planella
You want your applications reach millions, to be usable by anyone regardless of their language or writing system, and for this to happen transparently. Good news for you then: this is already possible using stable and proven internationalization technologies. It’s Free Software and it’s easy to integrate in your application. Learn how to prepare your applications to go international with David.

19:00 UTC
Widgetcraft: The Art of Creating Plasma Widgets – Harald Sitter
Plasma is the shell of the KDE Software Collection and available for many different form factors; it is almost entirely built out of widgets. Harald will show you how to create such amazing widgets, with surprisingly little code, to enrich your desktop experience and maybe even share with others.

20:00 UTC
Rock solid Python development with unittest/doctest – Barry Warsaw
If you’re asking yourself how to make your Python applications more robust and how to make your development workflow much more effective, here’s your answer. In this session, Python legend Barry Warsaw will show you how to easily add tests using the most popular modules from the Python Standard Library: unittest and doctest

Looking forward to seeing you all there in a few hours!

Back on March 9th I posted a wiki.ubuntu.com Upgrade Update which outlined a tentative timeline for the upgrade of wiki.ubuntu.com. Today the Community Council received another update from Charlie Schluting of Canonical:

We have openid (with teams) working in the latest moin. A test upgrade (of another wiki) that we started working on this week has resulted in data migration scripts doing “the wrong thing” with some links. We’ve not gotten past that yet, but it’s actively being worked on right now, and should be a fairly quick fix.

I still want to upgrade some smaller wikis first, because the audience/impact is much smaller. I expect us to have at least a test environment for wiki.ubuntu.com up near Natty release time (a few weeks). When we have that test wiki.ubuntu.com up, I’ll be soliciting for help with testing!

Thanks again to the Canonical team working on this, and for patience of the community as they work through these problems!

Originally posted by Elizabeth Krumbach here on Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 4:08 pm

Today it was announced that ShipIt, the free CD service that Canonical has been running since the inception of Ubuntu will be discontinued. I know some LoCo Teams may be worried about this, so I wanted to clarify some details right away.

• Why? – a few reasons. Firstly, CD distribution is not really as effective as it used to be, and it is expensive. These days, particularly with the availability of low cost hi-speed Internet growing across the world, more and more people are simply downloading the ISO images and burning them to a CD or installing from a USB stick. Canonical felt like it would make better sense to reduce the investment in snail-mail CD distribution and focus it more on LoCo Teams and use those savings to invest in other areas of the project.
• What about LoCo Teams? – here is the key point – we are still going to provide Approved LoCo Teams with CDs! We recognize the hugely valuable contribution LoCo teams make in advocating Ubuntu and helping people to use it and enjoy the freedoms in it, and we will continue to provide Approved LoCo teams with CDs that they can use for this advocacy work. As before, we encourage these CDs to be shared and re-used – Ubuntu CDs sat in a closet gathering dust don’t benefit anyone! Get the CDs, share them and re-use them.
• How do LoCo Teams get CDs? – there is a new form to fill in. Simple go here to request your CDs.
• Why can only approved LoCo teams get CDs? – the provision of free CDs from Canonical is an expensive service intended to empower LoCo teams in spreading the word of Ubuntu. Approved LoCo teams have demonstrated significant and sustained contributions in this area and based on this strong reputation we trust those resources won’t be wasted. Non-approved teams have not yet built that reputation, but when they do and get approved, they are welcome to apply for CDs too.

Alright, I think that covers the main points. Any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Originally posted here by Jono Bacon on Tuesday, April 5th, 2011.