Icon Based Menus Editorial
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.
Archive
A Global Naming Schema for Menu Items
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.
Why Games Matter
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.
Building The Next Generation, Part 4: Usability
Computers are complex systems but it's a mistake to assume they need to be complex to use. However, usability is not as easy as it may first seem. It is a different discipline from software development lacking the strict logic or having a "right way". There are only differing requirements and differing collections of guidelines. Making things easy is difficult.
Review of How Not to Program in C++
I first started programming C in high school. Most of what I learned was from a book I bought myself. The class itself wasn't very good. The book I had on C didn't teach me everything a beginning programmer needs to know.
Newbie’s Opinion: Suse 9.1 Professional vs. Fedora Core 2
Quite frankly, I got fed up with my Windows XP. Everything was wrong with it - security, stability, and price. So, I took a new step in my computer experience and tried going Linux. My only previous experience having been using and FTP Wizard to upload files to a web host, I could definitely be put into the "newbie" category.
Why Windows Isn’t Quite Ready for the Desktop
As I'm sure many have noticed, there's been a flurry of articles recently regarding the Linux desktop and the direction it "needs" to go in. A few have been insightful and offered up valuable information regarding the future of desktop computing. Most, however, have been painfully ill-informed or even confrontational. After sitting back and watching the fighting break out in the trenches, I decided to pen something from the opposite side of the fence.
A Review of Yoper Linux V2
Yoper Linux V2 was released a few weeks ago (July 13, 2004). After reading the release announcement on Yoper's website, I decided I had to try it. Yoper claims that version V2 "is the fastest Out-of-the-Box Linux system in the World".
The Problem with .NET Generics
One of the most awaited features of Microsoft .NET 2.0 is generics. Generics promise to increase type safety, improve performance, reduce code duplication and eliminate unnessecary casts. The most obvious application of generics in the framework class library are the generic collections in the new System.Collections.Generic namespace. Much has been written about those, but they are not the topic of this article.
LSB and “Dependency Hell”: the Buck Stops Here
What follows in the article is an analysis of the "dependency hell" problem in Linux and the issues surrounding software installation. I make a proposal of my own and critique the suggested "solutions" to these problems and point my finger at "the" (my perception) source of these problems.
Network Transparency and the Multi-Root Filesystem
This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge.
Syllable – The Little OS with a Big Future
Tired of endless Windows security problems? Intrigued by Linux's power but discouraged by its complexity? Tempted by Mac OS but not thrilled with the hardware cost? If so, you might want to investigate the growing bunch of hobbyist OSes -- Syllable, SkyOS, Haiku, MenuetOS, Visopsys, ReactOS and others. Syllable is perhaps the most promising of them all; it's a maturing open source desktop OS with an evolving kernel & device driver range, and is targeted at the home/small-office user.
New Piccolo releases for Java and .NET, new web site
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab.University of Maryland, has released new versions of the Piccolo framework for Java and .NET and came up with a new web site.
Why GNOME’s Got it Right
Last week, some developers disagreeing with the direction of the GNOME Project decided to create what appears to be the beginning of a fork of the project -- GoneME. *Updated*
Review: Pine Vs Mozilla ThunderBird
I had been an avid user of Pine for almost five years. Recently, I decided to move to a greener posture. I dumped my good old Pine and settled with a graphical client. Although, sometime I miss the simple, fast, text based interface, the new relationship is shaping up to be an exciting one. We have our bad times, but overall I am happy with the switch.
Video Production with Linux Part 2
In my first article I tried out various audio/video apps to see what Linux had to offer for video production. For the most part I was pretty disappointed with the whole experiment. Several months have passed so I decided to take another look to what has progressed since then. There were two programs that I left out because they were either not realized or it was to soon to try it out.
Programming Tools for the Hobbyist
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
Opinion: How Desktop Linux Should Behave
The promise of Desktop Linux (DL) has been long coming. It's made significant progress since the mid-90s when GNOME and KDE came out, giving Linux users a somewhat modern desktop to work upon. However, it's been 7 years and DL hasn't progressed much at all since then. Today, DL is still nothing more than a UNIX-clone with a task bar, a start menu, and a desktop with some icons on it. But why has DL evolved at such a glacial pace?
Review: Mandrake Linux 10
I know that a lot of people have posted reviews on Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, etc. but here is mine. I downloaded the first 3 Mandrake CDs from LinuxISO and then burned them to a CD while in Windows to get to work. I had a Windows XP installation on my 100GB hard drive, but I only have it on 30GB because Windows acts up so much.
Opinion: Why Linux isn’t ready for the Desktop
First of all, we should agree on what the definition of "ready for the desktop" stands for. For some of us it refers to a graphical user interface in which applications have icons and can be launched in an intuitive manner without the need of complex commands. Even a Commodore 64 running Geos could be "ready for the desktop" by this definition, but the fact is that when we read "ready for the desktop" we understand "ready to replace Microsoft Windows".