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There was requirement about "native interface". Only when Opera will learn that double-click used to select text (not to open pop-up menus). When drag'n'drop will finally start working (try to drag URL from location bar to create link, try to drop link to open in new window/tab). When UI will be drawn using host OS (menus are always too thin - provided the amount crap in the menus - they are barely readable, controls don't use system font, etc etc etc) When tabs will be closing in the order they are on screen - not some random order. When tabs would be simply switching by Ctrl-Tab. And finally when about box will be what it is meant to be - dialog box.

Until then, tradition of Opera to break UI rules with every new release, does no good. Opera can called anything - but "native application." Unstandard keyboard shortcuts (easy to mistype), unstandard behavious (always confusing with other applications), etc. "Native application" doesn't mean "picture looks like everything else". Opera's "nativity" - is skin deep only. For definition of what native application I can only direct you (and hopefully Opera's devels) to sources: MS Guidelines for UI development & Apple's HIG & GNOME HIG. Read that before reinventing square wheels. Send that to Opera - probably they do not know about the guidelines.

Mozilla people spend lot of time making sure that people used to various OSs and various UI standards will feel themself comfortable. Specifically goal of Firefox was good integration with host OS - Windows or Linux - even Mac OS X support now improved greately. Br... Somebody stop me. I'm flaming.

Gnumeric (spreadsheets), Abiword (word processing) and GnuCash (financing) are all excellent programs that the Gnome project collectively call Gnome Office. Anyone know if this is co-operative in any manner? ..good 'competition' to Open Office, even if they are not in the same class. It'd be great if these apps had a certain level of integration, although I can't think in what way off the top of my head.

Gnumeric (spreadsheets), Abiword (word processing) and GnuCash (financing) are all excellent programs that the Gnome project collectively call Gnome Office. Anyone know if this is co-operative in any manner? ..good 'competition' to Open Office, even if they are not in the same class. It'd be great if these apps had a certain level of integration, although I can't think in what way off the top of my head.

Gnome can also be "customized"... goto.. http://art.gnome.org/ and.. http://www.gnome-look.org/ or (google for more)

Why not use it? Oh, right. vendors....

Or this or this?

"Microsoft Office has built-in .. such as voice synthesizers, special screen readers and enlargers,"

Technically speaking such support is a function of the OS and as such is transparient to the application. As for 'OpenDocument-based products do not yet` this is also inaccurate. Makes one wonders just where he is getting his fastfacts from?

The Gnopernicus project .. allow low-vision and blind users access to standard .. applications via speech and braille output ..

Why a Windows-Only Argument Is A Bad Idea

Open Source Accessibility

Funny you should ask... I've just been doing legwork to make sure that my company can distribute some fonts with our software.

A good place to start looking is debian packages like x11/xfonts-* and text/gs-fonts. Also look at http://www.gnome.org/fonts/. Just make sure that you can find explicit licensing by the copyright owner for the fonts you want to use (and make sure that the license is permissive enough for your application).

The URW fonts donated to ghostscript are GPLed, but others (like the bitstream Charter and Vera fonts) are available under their own license.

--R

I'm a supporter of open source software as much as the next guy, and I wish what you said were true, but it simply isn't.

Reiser, JFS, and EXT3 are definitely journaled, and they do allow metadata to be stored with files, but they're NOTHING like what was intended with WinFS. And in all actuality WinFS doesn't really count as a filesystem per se, at least not like the ones you mentioned.

WinFS sits on top of NTFS, and is nothing more than an abstraction layer. It lets you do potentially crazy things like (and I'm making this up, purely for example purposes): "SELECT * FROM documents WHERE type IS image AND SOUNDSLIKE ohhhyeaahh"

If you're curious what WinFS is all about give the wikipedia entry a read.

The closest comparison (I can think of) to WinFS in the open source world (which one would argue is already better since it's not total vaporware) is Gnome Storage. There's also GnomeVFS, and the creators of the now defunct BeOS had a wonderfully similar BFS that supported relational style queries. There's probably tons more that I'm not aware of as well.

I predict we'll begin to see more and more of these abstracted file system layers in the future, but they're no replacement for (and will be useless without) an underlying filesystem architecture like Reiser, XFS, NTFS, etc, etc.

Have you never heard about One of my main reasons for not even looking at Ubuntu for longer than about install+1 hour is that it just looks plain ugly compared to Fedora. How weird.... I mean I really hate the brown/orange thing and the Gnome icons and text seem to look years behind Fedora, more like RedHat before Bluecurve or SUSE's Gnome, it's just unfinished.

Have you never heard aboutGnome look orGnome art , if only there was an easier way to install eyecandy than drag - drop

All they need to do is a Gaussian averaging kernel around the fractional pixel position they want to estimate the value of. It's not really hard.

I suggest optimizing Your approach for speed. After all, not everybody has a 3GHz machine (granted, outside the USA).

Have a look at gdk-pixbuf: they have implemented a "Tiles" scaling algorithm that seems ideal for this task: it's faster than bilinear interpolation, and the result is similar to bilinear when reducing the size.

It looks like nearest neighbor only when enlarging, but Firefox will never do that anyway...

Look here . Chosen quote:

GDK_INTERP_TILES
This is an accurate simulation of the PostScript image operator without any interpolation enabled. Each pixel is rendered as a tiny parallelogram of solid color, the edges of which are implemented with antialiasing. It resembles nearest neighbor for enlargement, and bilinear for reduction.

Also, see this Mozilla bug.

CLI programs are REALLY useful to look at "hidden" content.

'pdftotext' comes with xpdf & is even available natively on windows.

Similarly, for MS Word documents, you may use 'antiword', 'catdoc', and 'wv'.

These programs are quite nice in that they can easily batch-process a lot of documents & then you can go grepping through them for interesting tidbits.

(On the GUI front, evince deserves a plug. It uses the same poppler backend as xpdf and kpdf. I used to use tiny & fast xpdf for most of my pdf viewing, but evince has a few nice features which xpdf lacks & has become my personal favorite pdf viewer.)

actually thanks to rigorous backwards compatibility, you can be perfectly safe from productivity all the way through Vista.

"Backwards compatibility"? A lot of anti-productivity software is designed for Windows; it's not just a bunch of old DOS software.

Not that UN*X+X11 doesn't compete there.

At least Apple doesn't bundle much in the way of anti-productivity software with OS X - no Solitaire, for example.

I would like to hereby announce that I am porting my baby, NetworkManager, to SCO in order to reap the $100,000 offer. We will easily make "best wireless application."

Hey maybe someone should file an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for bundling their browser

Seems like the only thing keeping CORBA alive these days is Gnome.

If I understand things right, it is a very fundamental part of the architecture, so it's not likely to go away any time soon.

Ayup, GNOME has their own implementation of CORBA stuff, called ORBit.

Bonobo is the component framework in GNOME, and is built atop CORBA.

AFAIK they're still pretty much in use.

There are known bugs related to time formatting. See for instance http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343686 and http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336253.

There are known bugs related to time formatting. See for instance http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343686 and http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336253.

Patches for this problem available here, here and here.

As AC posted above,
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=188 624&cid=15546504

They do have pink feet,
http://art.gnome.org/backgrounds/gnome/1658

http://www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/

Nice of the GNOME project to send 3 people to the 2006 World Series of Poker.

Obviously? Why? There is a Gnome Women group. I'd guess they organized it.

Gnome already has OMG PONIES. What do they need women for?

but I have not found anything that provides the same level of functionality,

I have used Camtasia studio before and from what I have read from Istanbul it only does something like 1% of what Camtasia studio can do. Granted, the "basic" functionallity is still the same (capture in video a section of the screen), but then again Istanbul is far, far, FAAAAR away of being a replacement of camtasia.

If you're running Windows, there's Foxit Reader. It's a 1.5 MB download, uses less memory, and loads almost instantly. In about 2 years of use, I've only encountered a single PDF that it wouldn't open.

If you're not on Windows, there's xpdf, Evince, kpdf, gv, and probably a dozen others.

[...] who wants to have a special CSS file for their webbrowser to increase the fonts to 20pt because your OS renders those fonts in the webbrowser so small

Preferences... -> Tab "Content" -> Section "Fonts & Colors" -> Size: 20. No need for custom CSS or other fancy stuff...

Don't lie to yourself... OSs do not support desktop scaling.

Desktop -> Preferences -> Font -> whatever you want.

Sorry, but I don't see your problem.

You come to Slashdot and complain about people with bad taste? Poor move, my man. Poor move.

If you're a Linux user but you prefer Gnome to KDE, Rhythmbox also has AudioScrobbler integration and the ability to play last.fm streams is currently being worked on

If you're a Linux user but you prefer Gnome to KDE, Rhythmbox also has AudioScrobbler integration and the ability to play last.fm streams is currently being worked on

And F-Spot. While it's nice to see Google supporting Linux, it'd be much nicer to get linux versions of the apps that we don't have a equivalent 8)

There are products available, memprof, Coverity nessus which can be used to find and fix common forms of previous bugs. These fix everything from repeating previous security flaws (I note a previously unknown DoS flaw I found in Asterisk's skinny codec ages ago which emulated a bug in cisco call manager exactly, which I found with Nessus), to bad programming, or programming mistakes (Coverity), to memory leaks (memprof). These types of bugs are unacceptable, there are tools out there to detect them DURING THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE. I am not saying that you can fix every bug every time, but 5 digit numbers of open bug reports are unacceptable.

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ This is definitely worth a read. Many people who are good programmers aren't necessarily good at user interfaces, or worrying about how people will interact with the software. That is an area that open source software really needs to improve on, both in efficiency in usability, and in aesthetics.

All I really want in life is Visio for linux, or a decent clone, preferably with the network architect toolkit or similar.

It's called Dia

Abiword, Gnumeric and hopefully sometime this decade, Criawips.

12 Dec 2005 - Linus Torvalds states that "only idiots will use [Gnome]".
20 Apr 2006 - Linus claims "that [...] FreeBSD [People] are incompetent idiots."
12 May 2006 - The FreeBSD folks announce a tightly integratin of GNOME with FreeBSD.*

* You didn't click that link, did you?

Nautilus can't perform simple tasks such as deleting files and folders:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108307

The above bug is only 3 years old, however. Give it time ...

Considering the above, in what sense do we call nautilus a 'file manager'? We could call it a 'filesystem approximator' or something. I'm running a small ( 8 PC ) Linux-on-the-desktop testbed in our sales department. They've all got gnome desktops. But we have to use konqueror as the file manager! Sad but true.

The GNOME project always keeps reiterating how much they work to make GNOME accessible. For example, see the GNOME Accessibility Project. I'm not disabled and don't know anything at all about these technologies, so I can't verify their claims, though. Does anyone know how it compares with Windows/MS Office?

Not to pick on the parent poster, but for those interested...

gnopernicus
the GNOME Accessibility Project
britty (sorry, couldn't find a web site for it)
speechd-el for emacs users
the KDE Accessibility Project (to be ecumenical)
the Mozilla Accessibility Project

Found the first four on Ubuntu using synaptic and searching for "blind" and "gnopernicus" (OK, I remembered the name on that one); about a minute's worth of Googling turned up the URLs.

Now...that's not to say that those are perfect or meet everyone's needs; I wouldn't know, because I've never used them.

From TFA, it looks like the generic GIMP UI rant all over again; "[fill in blank] sucks, but I won't bother to tell you in particular what needs fixing." That's a great way to get the "code it yourself, then" response, but not particularly useful as far as getting what one wants.

"None of the prominent desktop applications that can create and save documents in OpenDocument currently work well with screen readers, magnifiers and other assistive technologies -- at least at a level comparable to that of products from Microsoft, whose 40-person Accessibility Technology Group is now widely praised by disabilities advocates"

I'm curious. I am not disabled but I've noticed many system wide accessibility features in linux in the various installs I've performed and a google of the web shows significant commitment and development to achieve accessibility in linux.

I'd like to hear some specifics on what is wrong with the current state of accessibility in linux and what is wrong with the current commitment.

The current argument is accessibility in ODF capable linux applications. Some of the accessibility projects are designed from the OS level up so I find it hard to believe there is no support in the applications when it is provided by the OS, so what is specifically wrong with what is there?

I also find it interesting that Windows accessibility required "kicking and screaming" to get 40 developers inside a multi-billion dollar corporation and yet the FOSS community appears to have a significant number of accessibility developers and the kicking and screaming just started. Is the whining justified or did Winske get an earful from the local MS rep?

http://larswiki.atrc.utoronto.ca/wiki/LinuxUnixAcc essibilitySoftware#OperatingSystemEnhancements

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/

http://accessibility.kde.org/

There's always pico, nano, Diakonos, gedit, ... But frankly I love using vi[m] :)

30 years of free software and it's STILL only elephantine GUI programs that have CUA user interfaces usable by mere humans.

Seriously. Where is the DOS EDIT clone?

I would agree that Wi-Fi on Linux has some issues, but as I mentioned in a previous post, the latest Network Manager should help out.

My Wireless experience with Ubuntu was a bit challenging, but only because of WPA. The hardware support is there for Intel PRO Wireless, and some others, but it is spotty. The new Network Manager should help with this as well (I'll let you know, I am installing tonight). As for any other Wireless hot-spot that is open, my Linux machine connects right away.

I would equate the state of Linux right now to the days of Windows 95; that is, most stuff worked OK from the GUI, but for many others you had to drop to DOS and edit config.sys or autoexec.bat, or configure BIOS with addresses and interrupts or manually set up drivers, etc. I am betting that in the next 5 years Linux Desktop Environments rival that of Windows. Just check out Enlightenment... This looks a lot like Vista and or MAC OS 10..

I can't blame just Mandriva, Wireless networking moved too fast for the Linux Distros and all of them seem to be "klunky" when it comes to Wi-Fi, but things are catching up.
Try downloading the latest Network Manager, which seems to be a lot better (I am gonna try this tonight)

Like how MS has the standard windows forms UI for most apps, a toolkit for office, one for visual studio, windows media player being totally different, windows explorer having a load of non-standard parts, and the XP-style control panel being different again. And this is within a single company, ignoring other popular propietary apps like winamp, itunes, maya/lightwave, etc. And even using standard toolkits companies often like to arrange things their own way...

A standard ubuntu install has openoffice (with GTK2-clone theme), Firefox (with GTK2-clone theme), and GTK2 -- and aside from OO and Firefox, I can't remember anything making me think "gah, why isn't this consistant?" (I now use abiword and epiphany anyway~)

On a related note, does MS have a HIG like Apple's or GNOME's?

Microsoft makes Totem?

Putting close buttons in individual tabs is nothing but evil, wrong and stupid.

One mis-click on a tab (which is very common when managing a dozen or so tabs) and you've just closed an important page with no confirmation dialog.

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335453 for the current gnome-terminal fiasco.

Just don't do it.

KDE has a tendency to fill every users system with crap that nobody uses.
And E or GNOME doesn't?

You, my dear sir, are an idiot. Not everyone shares the same interests, and it is practically impossible to find anyone who uses every single piece of software provided by a desktop environment.

What would nice however if this new technology used unix-style seperation of tasks, so that every window manager could use it, i.e. programs with commandlines like x_video_stream video.mpeg --window 12385 --default-x-server --size 320,240 --deinterlace, and stream_from_network_to_pipe nfsfile pipetouse.

This, more than anything else, would make more people use them because their usage can be CUSTOMIZED. Hiding stuff in an API is a mistake.

link

i hold notepad in the highest regard as a text editor

ACK
Notepad is terrible!!! I mean:

• No syntax hilight
• No completion
• Size limitations
• No line/column numbers
• No code folding
• No incremental search
• And the worst: it has bugs!! Even simple as it is!!

Use emacs, gedit, kate, or even notepad+ for a while and you will never use notepad again!