Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The second good thing that I have noticed is that it is gorgeous to look at. Compiz (the 3D desktop) is enabled by default, so I get all the nice 3D effects. This is pretty incredible as I have an onboard video card which shares 128MB of the system RAM. Vista's Aero would just laugh at this video card and tell it to grow up!
It also seems to be a lot easier on the eyes. If the Ubuntu team has selected new default fonts then I salute them.
Applications such as Firefox and Gedit (the default text editor, a bit like Notepad in Windows, but much more powerful) just look nicer. Enabling Subpixel Smoothing makes it even better (go to System, Preferences, Appearance. Under Fonts at the top, click on Subpixel Smoothing. Makes things look nice on an LCD screen).
Finally, there are a number of usability improvements. I mentioned two of them in the article I wrote about the upcoming versions of Ubuntu, but using them is a different story altogether (no pun intended!).
The ones I want to mention are both improvements to Nautilus, the file manager (a bit like Windows Explorer). Firstly, is tabs. If you have used IE7 or Firefox then you'll know how tabs work. Now you can have tabs in your file manager.
It might not seem like much, but now I only have to have one file manager window open, and can open tabs and copy and paste files between the tabs. This is quite simply a time and screen real-estate saver saver. I wonder how long it will take Microsoft to incorporate a tabbed file manager?
Secondly, is the icons for safely ejecting removable media, such as CD/DVD drives and USB keys. This is a bit like Microsoft's "Safely Remove Hardware" system, just straight from the file manager itself. I find this very useful as I use USB keys a lot to carry files with me.
All in all, this is shaping up to be an interesting addition to the Ubuntu line up.
As I type this, I have been notified that there are another 30.6MB of updates! Being Alpha software, it is under heavy development. I will be watching with interest to see how the developers and the community respond to the bugs that have been raised so far.
As always, please leave feedback, comments and questions. However, I will only respond to comments left on iTWire article discussion forums. The direct link for this article is here.
David Bass
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