As I already explained in the first Usability Terms article, consistency goes a long way in ensuring a pleasurable user experience in graphical user interfaces. While some user interfaces appear to be more graphically consistent than others, Windows has always appeared to be worse than most others - probably because it carries with it stuff that dates back to the 16bit era. IStartedSomething agrees with this, and started the Windows UI TaskForce.

Back in 2001, there was a company who thought they could launch a sustainable business model around a file manager. They wrote the file manager itself, and figured they could profit from offering online services delivered through the file manager. However, the company ran out of money quickly, and wen they released version 1.0 of their file manager, they had to fire everyone, only to go down a few months later. That company was Eazel, and the file manager was Nautilus. Apparently, some saw this as the demise of the Linux desktop - others didn't.

Thomas Thurman of Metacity fame has written a lengthy blog post on how Metacity themes work. "This is an article about how to theme Metacity. It is a work in progress, and I have had to dig deeply to find some answers. GNOME lets you theme a bunch of different things, but we’re only talking about window border themes here, which some people call Metacity themes."

Cloanto has released Amiga Forever 2008, the latest version of their emulation package. Amiga Forever allows you to launch various instances of different AmigaOS versions, as well as various old Amiga games. The operating systems' ROM files are provided on the disk.

eWeek's Debra Donston has penned down five ways the end user desktop in enterprises will look different in five years. While some of her ideas and predictions make a low of sense, there are a few things which are slightly debatable. Mostly, the reliance on virtualisation and web applications.

Microsoft has published a free 335-page book in .pdf format that explains all the details of developing for the Windows CE platform. "The kit, implemented as a 335-page book, provides valuable technical information for developers wanting to know more about Windows CE, regardless of whether they plan to take Microsoft's certification exam. The book is available for download - without cost or registration - as nine PDF files."

Two Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring reviews came out in the last couple of days. ZDNet notes that "Mandriva Linux is popular with developers and enthusiasts, and there's a thriving community ready and able to help with problems" and concludes that "overall we liked what we saw. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring may not be the best distro for the newcomer moving over from Windows, but if you're used to the way Linux works and want to try something different, give it a try". Linux.com praised the hardware support and the Control Center, and declared that "despite a few minor glitches, after several weeks of testing the two Mandriva flavors, I have finally come across a distro that gives you the best of the GNU/Linux and proprietary worlds in terms of ease of use, range of software, and stability on hardware that ranges from old Celerons to newer multi-core machines".

Tuesday, we reported that the KDE project had released the first beta of KDE 4.1, the release that is supposed to be ready to replace KDE3 on normal users' desktops. The information and marketing speak in the press release sure was promising, so Ars decided to take the KDE 4.1 beta out for a spin.

Yesterday, during the opening hours of the D6 conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher jointly interviewed Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. While the interview dealt mostly with the past, Yahoo, and a bit of Vista, by far the most interesting part was the first ever public appearance of Vista's successor: Windows 7. Earlier today, the team behind D6 posted a video of the demonstration, which was conducted by Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green. From a graphical user interface point of view, there were some interesting things in there.

Our advertising partner, Cnet Networks, has posted a reader survey, and I promise that they really will give $2000 to three lucky survey respondents. Since they've chosen to place the survey request as an ad itself, and most OSNews readers wouldn't know why Cnet was doing a survey on OSNews anyway, I thought I'd mention that this survey, and the $2000 drawing, are legitimate, and encourage you to participate. They don't want me to link straight to the survey for some reason, but if you see the survey invite above, click on it. Update: I didn't realize this before, but the drawing is only open to US residents.

Back in 1996, Palm released its first Palm Pilot PDAs onto the market, and quickly became a household name in the PDa business - so far as that Palm and Palm Pilot became synonyms for any PDA device. The company has hit some rough waters lately, but if it's up to CEO Ed Colligan, that's all going to change in the coming years.

Comic: "Eee".

The idea of open-source hardware is slowly slowly but surely gaining traction. VIA Technologies, Inc., joined in on the fun today by unveiling an open source reference platform for low power notebooks, based on its own processor technology (obviously). The CAD files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The machine is tentatively named OpenBook.

KDE 4.0 was released to mixed reviews; more or less everyone recognised the enormous potential of the still young platform, but some doubted whether or not the KDE project had made the right choice by releasing KDE 4.0 as, well, 4.0. The KDE developers were clear: just you wait for KDE 4.1. They released the first beta of KDE 4.1 today.