Graphics Archive

"If you don't have oodles of usability people, up front design by a good designer provides a lot more bang for buck than using that same designer to do usability tests" says Red Hat's Seth Nickell.

I've made a document based on an idea I had that might be good for some desktop innovation too. I've made some diagrams and screenshots to illustrate it, have a look here.

Steve Capps, co-designer of the Finder and much of the Mac's graphical user interface (as well as one of the folks behind the Newton OS), doesn't find much to excite him about either the Mac or Windows user interfaces these days.

"Windowing environments are in their third decade, and they still do little more than open and close. There's no reason windows can't be more sophisticated", Daryl Blakeslee writes on NewsForge.

Red Hat & Gnome hacker Seth Nickell wrote an interesting article about the Macintosh revolution ini the human-centered UI design and the source of this revolution, the Xerox PARC innovations in the mid-70s.

Mad Penguin put up an article with some mockups about a Slackware packager front-end. On other interface news, gTask is a daemon and client library that allows programs to communicate the progress of certain long running operations (e.g. downloading files, printing, etc) to the daemon. Various user interfaces can report on the progress of these tasks to the user. The project created after inspiration of an OSNews article. On yet another interface article, here is what Roberto Alsina wrote regarding the relationship between free software writers and UI designers.

"segusoLand is a program for GNU/linux that enables users to specify actions in a very uniform and intuitive way. Some people would call segusoLand a "desktop environment", some a "file manager", some a "start menu"... it is difficult to classify it because it is quite innovative. The big innovation of segusoLand is called "intelligent option narrowing". You won't find it anywhere else" says its author Maurizio Colucci. Check the application here and some screenshots here. Make sure you read the other pages too as they provide a lot of information as to what segusoLand really is and what it does.

A few hundred thousand lines of computer code could revolutionise the way people interact with computers, say its unlikely inventor and his backers. Denny Jaeger, a musician and composer who spent the past decade developing the software, will unveil it January 15, when people will be able to download a scaled-down version for free. The public can then decide whether Jaeger is a trailblazing whiz - or a grandiose flop.

" I am talking about the architecture, problems that can not be solved without incompatibilities or at least a lot of work. A ‘modern GUI-based OS’ is, for me, a OS that does not require a user to know or use a command line tool, even for rare system-administration tasks. That does not mean that it should be impossible to work with the command line and a text editor, but the command line must not be the only way to do an administration task." Read the article at KDEdevelopers.org.

DesktopX is a program that lets you design your own desktop by adding "objects" that can do pretty much anything you might imagine for it. Version 2.0 has just been released and it's a radical re-design that has focused on improving the functionality, performance, and memory use of it. If you don't have DesktopX, you can download it on its own here or get it as part of Object Desktop.

"To be truly free in the 21st century, we have to ignore the flashy graphics and really get inside our computers" says the Guardian, while Slashdot runs a story titled: "Tangible Interfaces for Computers".

Skinning does not really receive the appreciation it deserves. After posting my comparison article about LiteStep and Talisman, I was astonished to (still) hear people say that skinning and theming is useless. They literally said:

It is not fashionable nowadays to speak of the merits of the command line, in an age where things like streaming video and Aqua are an integral part of our daily life. However, I do not think that typed-in commands must necessarily be consigned to the dustbin of computer history. Of course, I am not suggesting that we all drop X and Windows and pretend like we are living in the early eighties. The command line interface still has much to offer us, and many of its benefits simply cannot physically be emulated or even replaced by graphical ones.

Advanced skinning, individualized desktops, animated icons, shiny colors and flashy windows: which alternative shell (for Windows) is the best?