natty narwhal

Our innovative Ubuntu leader, Mark Shuttleworth, agreed to revert to 0px borders, meaning that Natty Narwhal's users will enjoy border-less Ambiance and Radiance.
Yesterday, Mark was asking the developers to revert to 1px borders (read our previous post for full coverage) and just now, he has stated "Oh alright, let's fix the issues for Unity-2D and get the 0px theme looking stunning for release".

After a great feeling of joy and happiness generated by the border-less approach in Ambiance and Radiance (the light themes), I must say I'm quite disappointed by the re-bordering of this two great GTK themes.

Natty Narwhal's recent updates deliver us a quick handy way to access Ubuntu Control Center, the all-in-one place for settings, customization and preferences.

Just click on the Session Menu (top-right Unity panel near the Me Menu) and you'll see a new option added: "Control Center".

The Control Center was not so visible in other Ubuntu versions and one could access it only after prior selection from the hidden applications.

GTK 2.X themes have just received a huge improvement in a visual-related way, meaning that Natty Narwhal has now border-less active windows.

What is the purpose of this change?
It is only a visual change, the windows are cleaner, look sharper, consistent and "one-piece" look&feel.

Also,the amount of shadows has been increased and the active windows have a pleasant "3D" feeling.

A plethora of updates have just hit Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 3 aiming for stability, consistency and speed improvements.

Unity shell has been updated to version 3.6.4, bringing new interesting features:

After we delighted ourselves with the new recent UI improvements in the Dash, another amazing surprise is making its place in Natty Narwhal.
This little, but fancy and smartphone-like approach is represented by the new "overlay scrollbars", good-looking, thinner scrollbars that allows to the user to be more productive (the work area is bigger in Natty due to global menu and overlay scrollbars), concentrated on its work and it gives a strong feeling of freshness, innovation, modern OS.

Our lovely Natty Narwhal is growing every day and, even it's just an alpha (2), receives lots of new functionalities almost daily.
One cool, interesting feature is the new Mozilla Thunderbird extension that integrates Thunderbird into the Messaging Menu (currently, available only for Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal).

So, what is this Mozilla Thunderbird extension good for?

Just a few moments ago, Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 2, Natty narwhal, has just received yet another awesome UI improvement, making our lovely Natty a distinct, fluid and enjoyable experience.

Unity-shell reaches now 3.6 version (the previous one is 3.4.6) and it seems and feels that this past weeks were all about the Dash (like Neil J. Patel, Unity main developer, said).

So, what is new in Unity 3.6 (a.k.a. "Unity Alpha 3")?:

After weeks of "pain and misery", NVIDIA has just released the new 270 drivers series.

What was the actual problem?
There has been a shift from xserver 1.9 to 1.10 in the last weeks, shift that forced Natty Narwhal's users to use Nouveau, experimental 3D NVIDIA, etc (open-source drivers) in order to make Ubuntu 11.04 alpha 2 usable (NVIDIA 260 driver series is imcompatible with xserver 1.10). The problem is that Unity 3D needs the proprietary NVIDIA drivers to function at full speed (at the moment, at least).

Ubuntu 110.04 alpha 2 has just received some consistent UI updates, transforming Unity in a more pleasant experience.

Unity shell has been updated to 3.4.6 version and brings: