Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 18th May 2009 22:42 UTC
Tabbed browsing is pretty much the norm by now, with even someone like me (who disliked it vehemently for a long time) finally giving in and start using tabbed browsing (thanks to Chrome, by the way). Well, apparently, Mozilla thinks its time to move on. They believe tabbed browsing has become obsolete, and are asking users to come up with a better alternative.
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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
Google 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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/15/13 23:03 UTC
"During its Keynote today, Google announced new features coming to its flagship search function - you know, that thing we all started using Google for. VP Amit Singhal spent some time discussing what Google's search functionality will eventually morph into. Google's strategy is summarized by three words: answer, converse, and anticipate. Singhal explained that many of the pieces of these upcoming changes can already be seen in products that Google has recently introduced - namely, Google Knowledge Graph and Google Now, with perhaps a splash of Google Glass, too." I hold on to my hat every time Google changes Search. It's such a vital product in my daily life.More News »
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To me Opera's default user interface is perfectly fine. I don't see how its defaults are any less sane or usable than those provided by Firefox and Chrome, they aren't even that different in my opinion. Can you explain why you dislike it and how you would change it?
Users who don't need the extra features don't even need to encounter them. In Opera you can keep the tab bar and maximised tabs (its default settings), giving you simple tabbed browsing like other browsers. MDI and features like the Windows Panel and Session Management are there for people who find standard tabbed browsing overly limited; for them any extra complexity in those features isn't needless.
It's an interesting idea that might work well if it was implemented in an elegant way.
I use multiple windows and occasionally saved sessions to fulfil a similar function. If I want to put some pages to one side, without having to bookmark them, then I can open a new browser window and drag all those tabs into it. Opera's ability to filter the list of tabs and drag groups of tabs together speeds this up.
If I'm not going to be looking at them for a while then sometimes I'll save that window as a session and close it to free up resources. With sessions all the tabs in the window are restored with their previous state, although management of saved sessions could be greatly improved.
Opera's default UI doesn't take up that much more space than Chrome's. Opera's standard windows titlebar and toolbars are slightly thicker, and unlike Chrome it displays a menubar, but apart from that Opera just has a tab bar and address bar.
Maybe Opera could replace the full menubar with a couple of menu buttons on the address bar to make the default UI as minimalist as Chrome (an available option if you're happy to tweak Opera), but then that brings some usability issues when implemented by default. Hide too many features, too deeply in the UI, and new users might miss out on some of the best things about Opera.
As for Chrome letting you see the names of all the tabs in the window, that's only true if you open a very limited number of tabs. Browsing on my laptop's 11" screen, or without the browser window maximised on my desktop (I don't like pages stretched across a 24" screen), and even with a dozen pages open page titles get cut to a few letters. That's when multiple rows of tabs start to become necessary if you don't want to spread your tabs between a bunch of browser windows.
With a widescreen display, a sidebar seems like a better use of space to me, especially as it's also useful for managing file transfers and bookmarks, and in Opera provides a notepad (great if you're using the web for research) and other useful features.
Even on my laptop's small screen I prefer a sidebar; vertical space is particularly precious, and the sidebar can quickly be hidden and shown when needed. The Opera installation on my laptop generally just has the address bar visible, no menubar, tab bar, or anything else taking up space.
For quickly switching between tabs there's right-mouse-button+scroll-wheel (or ctrl+tab) to cycle through the tabs within the active window, with the Windows Panel available for tab management, the tab bar at the top becomes an obsolete feature to me.
That screenshot doesn't show a default Opera installation, both because this has changed since Opera 8, and because that showed a customised installation. Current versions of Opera do not have thick borders around tabs, the tabs fill the tab bar, and compared with a lot of other applications, Chrome for example, it fits in very well with the operating system's look and feel. To me things like skins and colour schemes just aren't a big issue when they can be changed in seconds with a few mouse clicks.
Of course issues of aesthetics are highly subjective, but I really hated the look of Chrome when I tried it. I like all my applications to have a fairly consistent look and feel; one of the first things I do when I install Opera is change it's skin to Windows Native, so that it fits in nicely with the rest of the UI. Part of the reason why I play video in VLC and play music with Foobar2000 is that they don't have non-standard skins that add annoying "noise" to the UI. In contrast the bright blue Chrome skin, with it's non-standard titlebar and controls, sticks out like a sore thumb on my desktop, and unlike Opera it doesn't work with my favourite Windows UI tweaks.