Well, this is sure to raise a few eyebrows here and there. Today, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Mark Shuttleworth held his keynote speech, and in it, he announced that Ubuntu will switch to the Unity user interface come release, for both the netbook as well as the desktop, leaving the GNOME user interface behind (but keeping the GNOME platform).
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Member since:2007-03-30
Member since:2005-11-14
Member since:2005-11-14
Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:2005-11-14
Because they built another shell on top of Unix? "
No, because their products (iPhone, iPad and soon OSX) have the same metaphor and the same look&feel.
So, people using one of them feels comfortable using all the others.
And, by the way, they have just ONE gui for OSX, ONE toolkit, ONE window manager, and they are not even themable, so all the Desktop and all the apps looks exactly the same.
We can argue for hours and hours if this is a good thing or not, but, truth is that people like it.
Member since:2005-11-10
What are you talking about? Just three years ago we were arguing how iOS had *no* consistency with anything before it.
Apple are successful because they pay attention to the details and don't just say "ship it" unless it has been thoroughly scrutinised. Other companies rush themselves too much and sacrifice everything to get it out quickly. Apple do not rush (the iPad was started _before_ the iPhone).
The web has succeeded and that's about as un-uniform and inconsistent as it gets.
Linux on the desktop doesn't need consistency, it needs to stop shipping half-baked products. Every time I boot the latest Ubuntu, I am able to find show-stopping user experience bugs within 15 minutes.
Member since:2005-11-02
This.
What Ubuntu was good at when it started was what I call integration, which could also be stated as "We took time to see that these things actually worked" instead of just compiling and shipping. This was refreshing at the time, but they never followed through on that initial promise.
A Linux system could be as nice as Mac OS X. All you need to do is hire a half dozen developers and some testers and designers and sit down with a set of functionality you want and a specific set of packages and bang on it until everything is nice, then ship it. What you can't do is package $everything and you can't ship unpatched close-to-upstream things if the upstream isn't willing to accept patches that make their app integrate better on just your system.
It's a lot of work and a lot of effort and when you're done you'll have laughably out of date versions of your software, since it will take months to properly refine each release. You'd have to have the balls to not care about this and keep focusing on a minimal feature set and high quality. It could have been done at any time in the last ~5-10 years. It hasn't been and it probably won't be, but there you are.
"In the first episode of Microsoft's new film series 'On the Whiteboard', Editor Pamela Woon chats with two-time Oscar winner Randy Thom about the (often underestimated) importance of sound in human-technology interactions. Thom, the lead sound designer at Skywalker Ranch who worked on films such as The Incredibles, Castaway and Forrest Gump, says that people rarely consider the significance of those signature sounds that come from their trusty devices, whether it be a cell phone, a computer or a tablet."
"Microsoft has sensationally abandoned its controversial plans to restrict the sharing of XBox One games, and has also removed daily online authentication requirements for its forthcoming console", reports The Guardian. They had no choice. Still a good move."A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane."MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Member since:
2005-11-14
fragmentation is one of the main reasons why linux haven't yet succeded on the Desktop (and probably never will)
we just don't need another shell.
what we need is a uniform, recognizable, homogeneous, consistent and working desktop.
That's why Apple is succeeding. Now they're making OSX looking like iOS. And that's what work for users: because they like things that work in a familiar way.
we already have too many DEs, too many distributions, too many office suites, too frequent releases etc.