Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 17th May 2007 18:54 UTC
In the GNOME bugzilla, there is an ongoing discussion about whether or not to include a patch into the default GNOME installation which would enable GNOME to (optionally) have a global application menubar, similar to that of the Mac OS and KDE (in the latter it is optional and off by default). Installation instructions and .deb packages, as well as a 60-page (and counting) discussion of the patch, are available on the UbuntuForums. Read on for a poll on this issue.
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Member since:2007-02-11
I haven't used Office 2007, but the screenshot seems familiar to me in terms of UI elements. Is that toolbar any different from a tabbed toolbar?
If so, these things already exist, and while they are useful (i.e. they can accommodate more options with less screen space), they fail to solve another problem. The reason why toolbars with many items are of limited efficiency is that there are only so many items a user can remember visually. Basically, if the user has to hover the mouse over the toolbar to get a tooltip, the whole point of the toolbar is lost -- it becomes just as efficient as a menu, only with more sugar.
Member since:2006-01-12
I haven't used Office 2007, but the screenshot seems familiar to me in terms of UI elements. Is that toolbar any different from a tabbed toolbar?
Huh?
In Office 2007 you can more or less create your own toolbar with the stuff you really need in the titlebar (+the file menu).
Admittedly in the last paragraph I *did* mean both the toolbar in the window title bar and the ribbon but the rest clearly wasn't about the ribbon.
If so, these things already exist,
Where? AIS I'd really be interested in a DE like that at least to have tried it once.
Basically, if the user has to hover the mouse over the toolbar to get a tooltip, the whole point of the toolbar is lost -- it becomes just as efficient as a menu, only with more sugar.
The idea is that you have a menu but with more screen real estate so you can have icons for all entries and text for the most important ones plus titles for different grouped icons.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4c/Office2007ribbon.png
It makes for easier access to functions, especially instead of large menus (that's the reason MS switched to the ribbon).
Imho the tabbed nature could be more of a problem in progs where you need only one entry of a menu and after that don't need the menu at all for a long time. In that case instead of menu->entry you'd have to click menu-tab->entry->home-tab to get back to the normal toolbar.
The reason I'd be interested in such a DE anyway is that I think there are possible work-arounds to that problem.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2006-01-12
Microsoft got it right more or less (yes, yes, you may shoot me now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Office07homestu.png
In Office 2007 you can more or less create your own toolbar with the stuff you really need in the titlebar (+the file menu).
Those buttons are
a) easy to reach if the window is fullscreen, thx to fitt's law
b) but avoid the problem where you have to first move your mouse to a window, activate it, then move back to the top of the screen for the menu bar.
This behaviour is optimized for apps you generally use maximized and reduce in size only when you switch windows often, which more or less is exactly how most people use office apps.
Of course MS snatched defeat from the claws of victory on the UI front with Vista. There the toolbars are all over the place, and the menus, lists and sidebars, panels, buttons at the bottom, top and on the backside of your monitor. When MS started to copy OSX someone should have told them that iTunes isn't the best place to start...
Oh, and KDE's and XP's control panels are a triumph of usability compared to Vista's.
I'd be really interested in a DE where the office UI was used consistently for all apps. I suspect it might not work quite as well for some kinds of apps, but overall it's the best alternative to the old menus+toolbars paradigm that I know. (well, apart from the the elegance and simplicity of the CLI of course =)