I manage computers running BSD variants every day, at work and at home. After many man page and RTFM iterations to support vital administrative aspects, a desire grew to understand what lay beneath my level of expertise. As eager as I was, I found the prospect of simply plunging into a lengthy code review unappealing.

I thought some users might be interested in the editorial I wrote on my blog about Icon Based Menus. A new idea for freshing on the menu system since MacOS 1984. The same site includes more UI articles.

Last week the GNOME project released the second edition of their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG 2.0). The HIG is an effort to push a more consistent look and feel on the GNOME desktop, and it's worthwhile reading for other projects as well.

"A couple of years ago I wrote a paper about what I'd do if I were asked to design a window system today. I never published it other than to hand it around to a few friends. So now, it's here," Java's James Gosling writes.

Nat Friedman posted recently some new screenshots from within his Novell Desktop showing Beagle, the Dashboard evolution. Beagle indexes the file system for intelligent searches similar to Apple's Spotlight solution. It is also capable on searching the internet while integrates well with many Gnome apps like Evolution and Gaim, including file selectors. Notice how the spatial Nautilus opens a new window for each search, containing only the search results.

Nowadays most kids are introduced to computers at quite a young age and understand that their future careers and lives are going to involve using them substantially. For many of them, computer games are an important part of their learning computer skills and can lead to an interest in finding out more about computers, operating systems, software and so on.