Submitted by SerenityOS, a UNIX-like OS written from scratch has turned one year old today. The authors have made huge progress and impressively it can now run Doom and render HTML content in its own HTML engine.
Be sure to scroll down the page for an overview of the progress that’s been made, including a bunch of screenshots that really show just how fast the project has evolved.
That’s pretty cool.
Ditto. It’s like Windows and Mac OS had a baby.
Unfortunately, I’m of the opinion that the decision to optimize for Fitts’s Law via the “global menubar” design is an artifact of MacOS’s single-tasking days that hasn’t aged well.
I much prefer having the menu bar strongly associated with what it controls by being part of the window.
Yes and no. The problem with each window having its own menu bar is that you can easily have too many similar-looking menus hanging around. Then again, it’s often not as obvious just what the global menu bar is controlling if you forget your place and aren’t in something obvious like an edit field.
I’d say we need something better than menu bars at this point, however that sort of thinking did lead to the abomination known as the ribbon, so I guess it’s pick your poison. Of course, now we get the hamburger-like menus in desktop apps now…
What a mess!
Ok, rant mode off. 😉
I personally really like the global menu bar. It’s not like you can use a menu bar without giving an application focus in the first place.
While I like the global menu bar, I really like focus-follows-mouse in Windows and X, and even with a delay set it can be a pain when there’s a dedicated menu bar.
hornett,
These are interesting yardsticks, haha.
Providing a frame buffer for older games is actually pretty easy since many of these old games like doom were almost entirely self contained and don’t require OS libraries (such as directx). An HTML renderer, though possibly less impressive to end users, seems like the bigger effort to me. I’m curious just how sophisticated it is.
I wanted to give the OS a try myself and I searched for a prebuilt VM image, but couldn’t find one 🙁 I know it’s lazy, but I didn’t really feel like building it myself just to give it a try. It would be nice to have a pre-built ISO/image to demo the OS.