The United Colours of Ubuntu

The lovely new grown up and professional branding of Ubuntu is great, I love it. The new Ubuntu Community Orange is great, however what colour is it exactly? Well looking at the design toolkit the official colour is an RGB hex specification of #DD4814 or a CMYK specification of  C0 M79 Y100 K0 or the Pantone colour 1665. So three different specifications, but they should all amount to the same thing surely? Well . . . no. If you put #DD4814 into Gimp or Inkscape or any Ubuntu app with a colour picker really, and then flip from RGB space to CMYK you will see that it corresponds to C0 M67 Y 91 K13. So is the design guide wrong? Well having discussed it with the design team they assure me that when actually printed on stuff C0 M79 Y100 K0 is absolutely the right colour  to match the screen colour of #DD4814.

Now in an EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file you can specify colours in several ways including the pantone colour. Here is a screenshot of various files from the design toolkit opened in Ubuntu. First a PNG specified in hex as #DD2814, then EPS files with the Ubuntu Orange colour specified as CMYK, RGB and as a Pantone colour.

Quite a spectacular range of colours really! So is Ubuntu getting this all wrong then? I asked someone who still has a Windows machine to try the same thing. . .

That is Adobe Illustrator showing the EPS files and Windows picture viewer for the png. So a different range of assorted colours from the same files! How about a Mac, designers use them, they must get it right!

Yet another collection of colours (not entirely sure of the order of the EPS files, but the .png is the one that opened in the browser).

So it seems that colour matching across images and operating systems is in a confusing and contradictory state of affairs. Personally I think Ubuntu gets it right, stuff generated in an Ubuntu app with #DD4814 can then be printed to a PDF and it is still #DD4814. PDFs produced by the designers seem to have the colours not quite right. This evening there is an Ubuntu Developer Summit session on colour theory and the Ubuntu palette https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/multimedia-design-n-science-of-colour where the plans for colour will be discussed. Should be an interesting session.

Ubingo!

Next week is a rather special week in the Ubuntu development cycle, it is the Ubuntu Developer Summit. This is a gathering hosted by Canonical, this time in Orlando, Florida, where developers and all those interested in the future direction of Ubuntu can discuss in person the plans for the next 6 month development cycle leading up to the Natty Narwhal release.

It isn’t just a random talking shop though, there is a very structured and full schedule, in fact you can see it all here http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-n/ the times are all local to Florida, which means the day starts at 2PM UK time. To participate remotely there are IRC channels for each room and there will be remote audio to listen to, so wherever you are in the world you can get your thoughts and opinions across, and choose bits that you want to contribute to in this cycle.

The whole thing kicks off with a keynote address by Mark Shuttleworth on Monday, where he will set out some of the major themes of the week and of the cycle. To spice things up a bit for all the remote participants we have created a little game to play along from home, click the link to start playing:

ubingo

Rules

• One gulp of $drink for each word said during Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote speech at the Natty Narwhal Ubuntu Developer Summit
• Finish the glass you are on when you complete a line (and pour another)
• Have a shot glass lined up to down if you get all the words
• If you are in a timezone where the sun is not yet over the yard arm, or are not of drinking age or inclination then you might want to use a non-alcoholic beverage, this is of course perfectly acceptable
• Players attending UDS in person should probably not be drinking (or shouting out “House!”)
• Players should join the #ubuntu-UDS channel on freenode to shout out the words they spot (although we might move to a different channel if play becomes disruptive)

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

sudo apt-get purge libmono* cli-common

The following packages will be REMOVED
cli-common* gbrainy* libappindicator0.1-cil* libart2.0-cil* libgconf2.0-cil*
libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libgmime2.4-cil* libgnome-vfs2.0-cil*
libgnome2.24-cil* libgnomepanel2.24-cil* libgtk2.0-cil*
liblaunchpad-integration1.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil*
libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib2.0-cil*
libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil* libmono-management2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil*
libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil*
libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* mono-2.0-gac*
mono-csharp-shell* mono-gac* mono-gmcs* mono-runtime* tomboy*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 31 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Maverick Meerkat Release Parties in the UK

This weekend the date on Sunday will be 10/10/10 and this being a rather special number it has been declared a global day of doing for reducing carbon outputs and participating in environmentally worthy projects as well as a good day to get married as 101010 in binary is 42 in decimal it has also been declared fourty two day in celebration of the Hitchhiker books of Douglas Adams. We will be doing something much more important however as it is the release day of Ubuntu 10.10 the Maverick Meerkat. In the UK there will be a release party on Sunday, which is also a 42 day celebration including screening of the HHGTTG film. The event will continue into the evening and I am sure a good time will be had by all those who don’t come dressed as Marvin the paranoid android.

A somewhat more civilized and sensible event follows on Tuesday 12th at Fossbox in London, mainly aimed at charities and the voluntary sector, introducing attendees to the Ubuntu desktop.

On Wednesday 13th there is another event, this one hosted by University College London and aimed mostly at students, but open to all.

On Saturday 16th in Swindon there will be demos and info about Ubuntu at the Museum of Computing, again this event is open to all.

If you are in the area of any of these events then do pop along, either if you haven’t used Ubuntu before and want to find out more, or if you are a seasoned veteran and want to meet other people in your area and talk about Ubuntu.

If you are wondering why there is a bit of a London focus to the events (apart from the Swindon one of course) and you want an event in a city near you then don’t forget *you* can organise events, and ask for help in the ubuntu-uk mailing list to gather support for an event where you want it.

vtiger CRM – A “Proper” Open Source CRM

I wanted to point any readers who may be interested to a new post I wrote over on our company blog. It discusses the latest release of a very popular business application we spend more and more time working with our customers on – vtiger CRM. CRM meaning Customer Relationship Management. Not only do we help others use vtiger CRM, it is also our own tool of choice for Sales and Marketing Automation.

The company behind vtiger CRM just released the latest version, 5.2.0, which has several major new features and lots of minor tweaks and improvements too.

We think this is the best truly Open Source CRM application currently available. There are other CRM systems that claim to be Open Source but are actually Open Core which is not the same thing at all.

If you want to learn a little about vtiger CRM, please drop over here and feel free to use the comments or contact-us page if you want to find out any more.