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You know, the one that was in 10.04 and before, before Unity. The new one is missing so many nice features such as showing the location on a map, showing the night on said map and having an overall much nicer presentation of the various locations entered. I am traveling a lot and also communicating to people from other parts of the globe and I miss that overall presentation which was very neat and easy to read. The new one is cramped and dull. And there is no automatic sorting of places depending of time. And I like seeing the time differences (CST+6) so I can compute other times.

Also I now time and weather are two different things but having the local weather shown next to the location name was very nice.

So my question is: Is this the definitive look of the applet or are improvements planned for the following releases?

and a sub-question: Why change something that works?

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I can't speak for the future but for your secondary question it changed because it's essentially a different application. Ubuntu Classic (and by that I mean older versions of Ubuntu too) uses a gnome-panel applet and unity uses its own built-in clock widget.

I've had a look through the filed bugs for Unity but can't seem to find anybody reporting this feature omission. If you want it back, you should probably start by filing a bug. The Unity maintainers can then consider the issue and interact with you accordingly.

On a sideways note, this isn't just a case of pulling some code across because Canonical makes things harder for themselves. Canonical likes to keep their projects' code covered by a contributor agreement, essentially allowing them to release their projects under any license (closed, public domain, etc) at their whim.

This means in order to pull features in from existing code (if that worked techically), they'd either taint the codebase with non-CCA-covered-code (arresting their ability to re-license) or they'd have to do a dark-room port (have somebody who hasn't seen the original gnome-panel applet's code, develop it from scratch).

<plug> I had a rant about this on my blog quite recently. </plug>

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Thank you for your advice, I took the liberty to open a bug report –  jarreboum Aug 11 '11 at 18:51

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