Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 13th Jan 2008 20:09 UTC
KDE 4.0.0 has been released on January 11th, after a number of delays; the months preceding the release, the KDE developers tried very hard to downplay expectations. KDE 4.0.0 was just the first release in the KDE 4 series, and such, should not be seen as the best possible representation of the KDE 4.0.0 vision. So, when I installed KDE 4.0.0 on my Ubuntu Gutsy installation last Friday, I knew what to expect: KDE 4 Developer Release 1 (yes, I am a BeOS guy - how did you know?). Read on for a few quick first impressions.
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Member since:2005-09-21
The menu style and transitions are a matter of taste, not science.
Well, partly. The style may be partly taste, but the value of fluid transitions has been quite extensively studied. A transition done right is always easier to understand than a sudden change (which can induce change blindness).
Member since:2005-06-29
Well, partly. The style may be partly taste, but the value of fluid transitions has been quite extensively studied. A transition done right is always easier to understand than a sudden change (which can induce change blindness).
It's not the transition I have issues with, it's the sliding concept in itself. I have a 22" 1680x1050 screen, why the need to cram all the menus into one tiny sliding box? It hides the menu path from view, and makes it unnecessarily complex to travel backwards.
Edited 2008-01-13 22:13 UTC
Member since:2005-08-28
Member since:2005-06-29
Well, what bothered me about the new menu is how some things you can just roll over (the five tabs at the bottom) while some things you have to click on (the 'back' button, the scrollbar).
You can disable the activate-on-mouseover thing somewhere, but since my Ubuntu machine is powered down, I can't check exactly where it was. Probably right-click the Kickoff button.
Member since:2007-03-29
Spatial browsing was also found to be more efficient yet met with much resistance when Gnome introduced it as you may recall.
...and it never really became popular. Ubuntu at least has made the good old browser mode default and not without a reason. Actually, I forced myself for some time to use spatial mode as everyone hyped it as the next big thing being sooo much more usable. However I never really felt comfortable with windows that offer not even an address bar, so when I saw that Ubuntu defaulted to browsing mode it came as a relief.
Quite possible the new menu replacement may suffer a similar fate, being ignored or replaced by distributors.
am I the only one, or is the original kickoff in OpenSuSE 10.3 really so much more usable than the derivate found in KDE 4? Actually, when testing OpenSUSE I was surprised to find that I actually liked SuSE's kickoff, basically because how it integrates the type ahead search.
News
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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2005-07-06
The menu IS fixed size, though the size is configurable. For people who have gotten used to a menu that expands to fit the contents the use of a scrollbar is awkward. Perhaps studies have shown it to be better, but it makes it inconsistent with all previous experience for users and with application menus.
The menu style and transitions are a matter of taste, not science. Studies may have shown that this menu is better. I will not argue the veracity of the conclusions in either direction. The fact is that for many the new menu is far from an optimal user experience. Spatial browsing was also found to be more efficient yet met with much resistance when Gnome introduced it as you may recall.