Like Ubuntu's Unity interface? Great. If not, you can easily change it to look and act like Ubuntu used to. This tutorial shows how.

"Jolla has signed a Sales and Distribution agreement with D.Phone Group, the largest mobile phones retail chain in China. Together the companies have a shared target to reach significant sales volumes in China's 150 million smartphone market. The agreement is such that D.Phone will start sales and distribution of Jolla smartphones in China, utilising D.Phone's vast network of over 2000 retail stores to reach the Chinese consumers." Wow.

Hurray for openness and the community: "Over the last week, our Jason Parker (a.k.a. kornyone) has been playing with his Nexus Q, seeing how far he could push it and how capable it could be. It started with the basics (fastboot and adb pushing) and then Trebuchet, Netflix and other apps, followed by XBMC for Android. Well, now Jason is back with another breakthrough - CM9." Just keep beating that tired and worn drum of placing open between quotation marks, John. You're very convincing.

"The nation's top patent court has stopped a lower court from throwing out four patents on financial software, used to sue a bank dealing in foreign currency exchanges. The controversial opinion, countered by a blistering dissent by one member of the three-judge panel, shows that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is in disarray about just what is patentable. An 'abstract idea' can't win a patent, but the judges on the court are in disagreement about just what that is." It seems that US judges are getting more and more vocal about the US Patent Mess. Interesting.

"People who don't play video games would be forgiven if they turned on an Xbox 360 and didn't realize it was a device used to primarily play games. The first screen you see on the Xbox 360 Dashboard is often a mixture of ads for all sorts of goods and services, and many times games are in the minority of ad slots. The latest redesign increased the ad space that can be sold to advertisers, and that in turn increased this problem. Let's be clear, it is a problem." No kidding. I pay for Xbox Live, yet I'm being bombarded by useless crap ads. It's ridiculous. And yet I don't stop playing. It seems as if there's a solution to this problem in there somewhere, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

"It's never good to scare away your customers. It's even worse if you don't realize you're doing it. That was me. Like most folks in the developer community, it's been years since I last used Internet Explorer as my daily browser. Oh sure, we all keep copies around for web development work, but Firefox, Chrome, and Safari now rule the web roost. Unfortunately, that was not the case with the Blurity userbase." Wise lesson from Jeff Keacher.

Ars Technica is running an interesting article about the Mail application on Windows 8. It's one of the first party Metro applications, and Ars' conclusion is that it's really, really not up to snuff - it can't even compare favourably to the mail application on Windows Phone. The sad thing is, however - this applies to virtually all Metro applications.

Good news for Raspberry Pi owners (ha!): the RISC OS port is progressing along nicely. So much so, in fact, that a Raspberry Pi-based RISC OS machine is in the works. Stable beta release of RISC OS for the Pi planned for September!

Judge Richard Posner, who dismissed the lawsuit between Apple and Motorola, posits his solutions to the dysfunctional patent system. "There are a variety of measures that could be taken to alleviate the problems I've described. They include: reducing the patent term for inventors in industries that do not have the peculiar characteristics of pharmaceuticals that I described; instituting a system of compulsory licensing of patented inventions; eliminating court trials including jury trials in patent cases by expanding the authority and procedures of the Patent and Trademark Office to make it the trier of patent cases, subject to limited appellate review in the courts; forbidding patent trolling by requiring the patentee to produce the patented invention within a specified period, or lose the patent; and (what is beginning) provide special training for federal judges who volunteer to preside over patent litigation." I like this guy.

Ars Technica is reporting that certain 64bit Mac models won't be able to run Mountain Lion. The problem is the graphic card drivers; these are still 32bit, and Apple is unwilling to update them to 64bit. A 64bit kernel can't load 32bit drivers, so that's that. Apple has a list of supported models on their Mountain Lion upgrade page, so you can easily check if your computer is capable of running Mountain Lion.

Stefan Constantinescu interviews the CEO of JollaMobile, the company that will continue the work that Nokia started with Maemo/MeeGo before ditching it for Windows Phone. This answer indicates just how far these guys already are: "In order to make a smartphone these days you need chipset vendor support, ODM support, and some other companies too. We're currently in the negotiations phase, and we're really close to being able to communicate what partners we actually use. This is our present situation."

Andrew Binstock interviews Alan Kay, and there are just so many fantastic quotes and insights in there I have no idea what to pick as the OSNews item. This one? "Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future - it's living in the present," Kay argues, "I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where - and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." What about this gem? "I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages." Or, my personal favourite: "My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults." Read this. Now. That's an order.

"We're able to produce absolutely stunning websites and mobile apps with great interaction design. Interfaces that are smooth and fun and let us understand information without even trying. But when it comes to email clients, we get a bit of a boring feeling, like using an old piece of software from 10 years ago. I think we can do better. So let's do that." Great ideas and beautiful design by Tobias van Schneider, but why he would forcefully shoehorn this clearly digital UI into Mac OS X is beyond me. It has no place there. This just screams Metro.