Adrien Plazas got the opportunity to interview the founder of Yorba, Adam Dingle, to chat about his job as a software engineer, Yorba, and open source software.

Lately we've been making our way through the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) reworking old bits and writing new sections. We've been focusing on making the HIG the best it can be, rather than limiting it to what's currently out there. Take a look at the updates that've been made and what's yet to come.

It's the stuff of epic flame wars. "My button position is better than yours" surely gets the blood boiling. So let's take a second and talk window controls. What do they do, why do we have them, what order should we put them in, and on what side of the screen.

I've been working with elementary and the community for quite some time now, and I've gotten a pretty good feel for the individuals that make up the awesome team. Not only that, but I know the direction of the project as a whole, and I help keep things on track. Heck, that's why I'm part of the team to begin with. I've invested countless hours of my time into helping to craft an incredible open computing platform. So when it receives criticism, I take it personally.

We often get asked to distribute software like LibreOffice, Firefox, Google Chrome, WINE, applications that use Qt, etc. And for the traditional Linux distribution this is a perfectly reasonable request. The typical distro make up for home users consists of a kind of software Top 40 where the distributors pick out their favorite existing apps and bundle them together along with their favorite existing theme. Then they usually have some sort of branded default wallpaper. Maybe they'll go the extra mile to replace splash screens (Yes some apps do still have splash screens) with branded ones. Sometimes a distributor will even contribute "upstream" in order to lobby certain changes. And very rarely a distributor will create their own software as a little special something.