Graphics Archive

At its annual MAX user conference, Adobe puts on the dog and serves up new tooling and other support for Flash. Adobe introduces Flex Builder Gumbo, Flash Catalyst – formerly known as Thermo, the availability of Adobe AIR 1.5 and a pre-release of the 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10. Adobe also opens up its cloud initiative, known as Cocomo, as a public beta.

Oliver Hamann released a new version of his futuristic user environment called Eagle Mode. But the most interesting news is probably his project philosophy. There he lists pros and cons for replacing most of today's user interfaces by zoomable user interfaces. But unlike others, he don't want to replace the concept of desktop windows.

The GIMP Project has released GIMP 2.6.0. Among some UI-based changes and additional fixes, it comes the long promised integration of the GEGL library. The promise of 16 bit per-pixel non-destructive editing goes back to 2002, but it's at last here. This means that GIMP is now ready for prosumer (and in some cases even professional) photographer's usage, and this can only be big news and a big win for the F/OSS movement. GEGL will also help in future releases with proper support of CMYK. UPDATE: I guess things are not as good as the release notes want us to think. GEGL was turned "on" in the Color menu as per instructions, but I still got a no-support message for high depth TIFF pictures. If GIMP can't read existing 16bpp pictures, the feature I earlier gave them so much credit for, is useless.

This is the ninth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms . On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part IX, we are going to talk about the menu.

Now that the second deadline for Fedora 10 themes has been reached, the remaining theme proposals have matured and gotten much, much better. At this point, it is clear that no matter what theme is chosen, Fedora 10 will look great. Still, all themes are not equal. These are some of the best, though.

This is the eighth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms . On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part VIII, we focus on the tab.

360Desktop is a software that extends the Windows desktop into a panaromic desktop, with unlimited space. In addition, "it allows users to easily grab their favorite web content from across the web, and put it right on their expanded desktop". Demo of 360Desktop in action.

Not as sick as you might think. Building on the output of the synclient program, the Perl code presented here allows you to assign specific application functions to "Three-Finger Swipe," as well as open- and close-pinch gestures on your Linux laptop. So if you've been wanting your Linux device to act more like your iPhone, here's a start.

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.

You'll find flash file systems used in personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellphones, MP3 players, digital cameras, USB flash drives (UFDs), and even laptop computers. This article looks at a couple of the read-only file systems and also reviews the various read/write file systems available today and how they work. Explore what the flash devices are all about and the challenges that they introduce.

Read Write Web has an interesting article on the concept of the contextual user interface. A contextual user interface - as the name implies - is an interface which adapts to the current wishes of its users, the context. The interface will change according to the actions the user takes; present a set of minimal options, and show other options as the user goes along. While the article makes some good points, it also contains some generalisations that I find rather debatable.

Rethinking the desktop metaphor, or even improving it in any significant way, is a daunting task, and few dare to take the risk. The end result is that the desktop metaphor that we use today barely changed over the years - which is quite unique for the computing industry, as normally, things change very rapidly.

The trash can metaphor in computing is as old as the desktop metaphor itself. It was first introduced with the Apple Lisa user interface, and found its way to the Macintosh. Apple patented the whole idea, and sued anyone who tried to use the same name, resulting in other user interfaces implementing the exact same principle but just named differently. Despite its old age, and the fact it barely changed over the decades, many people have issues with the traditional concept.

From John Nack's blog: "In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only."