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: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.
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?
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).
Well... I was referring only to the ribbon.
A tabbed toolbar is, well, a combination between a toolbar and a tabbed view. You have one toolbar with several tabs -- and, as you click each of the tabs, a different set of buttons is displayed. Much like, ugh, this one: http://www.library.uq.edu.au/iad/databases/images/bsp_tabbar.gif .
I'm not sure what you meant by the office UI used consistently for all apps. If you refer to using a widget similar to the Office Ribbon for every application, I don't know of any; afaik, all past experiments with something similar haven't been too successful (in fact, a couple of 3rd party apps to patch the Office Ribbon and give MS Office its old look are already around). If you refer to all applications having a consistent, similar interface, that's NeXTStep, and if it wasn't for Steve Jobs' stupid ideas it might have got much further than being chopped into OS X.
Member since:2005-07-12
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
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
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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
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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."More News »
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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.