Over the past few decades, the software that enables us to be productive with our computers has become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Today's UI designers are faced with the challenge of devising graphical user interfaces that are easy to grasp and use, yet still provide access to a wide range of features. Here are some ideas about the nature of GUI complexity, followed by a couple of thoughts on simplicity that might just surprise you.

If you were, you know, living your lives, you've probably missed it, but old fires are burning brightly once again: there's somewhat of a falling-out going on between KDE and GNOME, with Canonical siding squarely with... KDE. The issue seems to revolve around GNOME's lack of collaboration, as explained by KDE's Aaron Seigo.

"Google has issued a new stable release of the Chrome Web browser and is rolling it out to users. The new version introduces some noteworthy JavaScript performance enhancements, new plug-in security features, improved support for synchronization, and a new user interface for managing the browser's settings."

"Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below..."

"As Nokia has dropped MeeGo as its primary smartphone platform, the MeeGo architects have taken the opportunity to change some of their plans for the mobile Linux. In a posting to the MeeGo architecture lists, Intel developer Arjan van de Ven, said that "just not everything is clear yet around 'who' and 'what'", but that there were some final decisions the architects were prepared to make."

"One of the benefits of the direction that's been taken with the next release of Ubuntu is that there is no longer a need for a separate netbook edition. The introduction of the new shell for Ubuntu means that we have a user interface that works equally well whatever the form factor of the PC. And the underlying technology works on a range of architectures including those common in netbook, notebooks, desktops or whatever you choose to run it on. Hence the need for a separate version for netbooks is removed"

The WebM project Blog has announced an update release of the VP8 Codec SDK codenamed the "Bali" release. The Bali release was focused on making the encoder faster while continuing to improve its video quality.

Grizzled Unix vet Paul Venezia tips his cap to the Windows Server crew, suggesting that the lessons of Unix history have not been lost on Microsoft -- and that's one reason why Windows Server has become so complex. 'The Windows Server of today has more in common with Unix than many people want to admit. The upside: more stable servers, greater scope of services, better adherence to standards, and Microsoft's newfound willingness to work with its competition. The downside is that Windows has become more complex than Unix from a management and administration point of view,' Venezia writes, even if he still sees some Windows admin practices as prime examples of how not to administer servers.

Well, how about some positive news to end this day? How about annoying the heck out of the Business Software Alliance? There's a new proposal for a directive on consumer rights in the EU, and in it, digital goods - software, online services, and so on - are explicitly defined as goods that are no different than any other good - like bread, watches, or cars. In other words, you would suddenly own the copies of software you buy, effectively declaring the EULA as a worthless piece of paper. Surprise - the BSA is not happy about this.

I have to admit I've been struggling with this one for a while, most importantly because I haven't used GNOME 3 yet; I'm setting up my own little company right now, so time's a little short. As such, all I can do here is cover the arguments given - which, in my book, have both their strong as well as their weak points. Yes, GNOME 3 will not have buttons for minimising or maximising windows.

Since the web has a tendency to overstate things: no, Nokia is not selling Qt. Today, Nokia announced that Digia will acquire the Qt Commercial software licensing and professional services business from Nokia. So I repeat: Nokia is not selling Qt.

HP recently posted new videos of their developer sessions at Mobile World Congress. As it turns out they aren't just interesting for developers - in particular, Part 3 offers a glimpse of the TouchPad UI that's a bit more in-depth than what we've seen so far. For developers, there's also an overview of the development environment(s) (part 4) and an introduction to the new SDK "Enyo" (part 5).

"Despite Nokia's decision to partner up with Microsoft and introduce a new ecosystem to the mobile industry, it was announced by Nokia's CTO Rich Green at last months Mobile World Congress during his keynote speech at the Developer's day workshop, that Nokia will still be launching a new MeeGo device this year. Green went on to give reassurances that Nokia will continue to be committed to the MeeGo, Symbian, Qt and S40 platforms and their future in Nokia's three year ecosystem vision."

"In this post I show step-by-step how you can setup your own "Super computer cluster" using Ubuntu MPI Cluster from multiple machines with the goal of bruteforcing strong encrypted passwords with John the Ripper for academic purposes. Owners of quad core machines will also benefit from this setup as the "john" binaries found in the Ubuntu Repositories are compiled to run on only one core. I managed to decrease the time required to crack password hashes using this setup."