Ubuntu 12.04 development hits the User Interface freeze tonight. This is also evident from all the user interface updates trying to meet the deadline. One such update brought a significant update to the Ubuntu One control panel.

We all know about Ubuntu One, sync service developed in house by Canonical. In this update, the Ubuntu One developers have released a new interface based on the toolkit QT. This new interface is going to be the standard interface on all platforms like Windows, Ubuntu and MAC OS. A step in trying to bring about some integrity and commonality in the Ubuntu One usage on all platforms. It also helps with the Ubuntu One branding.

Without further prolonging, here are the old and new welcome screen. In my opinion, I actually like the old welcome screen better. It brings a nice contrast of orange, black and light grey.

Then you are presented with the Control Panel which can be seen in the following screenshots. The new control panel looks impressive with its dashing orange and white interface.

As a reference here is the old Ubuntu One control Panel,

As you can see, the new interface looks more modern. Of course, the new interface still needs to tweaked more to blend in nicely with other Ubuntu applications. Also during my usage, I felt it was very responsive and easy to use. The old GTK+ interface will be abandoned and phased out soon. The reasons for dropping the GTK+ interface were,

• Uses the deprecated pygtk bindings
• Offers to install desktopcouch which is no longer supported
• It is not aligned with the Ubuntu One new branding guidelines.

You can read more about this here.

Users who are using Ubuntu 12.04 should get the updates soon. However, there are some who are like me facing a bug where the Ubuntu One installer pops up asking us to install Ubuntu One despite it being already installed by default. Well you can solve that by typing, sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-control-panel-qt in the terminal.

As a bonus to all this, the update also installs the ubuntu-one plugin for rhythmbox removing the banshee plugin. However, you need to enable the plugin in Rhythmbox before you can use it.