I love the NeSTStep UI. But it has the same problem as Gnome 3, GNUStep is not a Windows 95 clone, so everyone will hate it.
The point I'm trying to make is that for the last almost 20 years, Windows 95 has been held up as the gold standard of UI, for a UI to be accepted, it evidently needs to be a clone of Windows 95. So basically thats why all these people are freaking out over Gnome 3: Gnome 3 is not a clone of Windows 95 so its bad. KDE and Gnome 2 are clones (fairly bad clones in Gnome 2's case) of Windows 95 so they are good.
No, I don't think Gnome 3 is perfect, far from it, but at least it tries to show that you do not have to clone Windows 95 to have a desktop UI.
What is the obsession with Windows 95 being the gold standard on which all desktop environments need to be based???
I for one really like Gnome 3 because it is finally no longer a Windows 95 clone like Gnome 2. I'm sorry to people whose first computer used Windows 95 or any of the other Windows 95 based desktops (like Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, KDE or Gnome 2.x), folks there are other ways to use a computer.
So, Mint took Gnome 3, and made it look like Windows 95 again, freaking great!.
Seriously, WTF would I install an app thats basically a web page to use GMail when I have the built in mail app?
I just enable IMAP on GMail, and all my computers using that account are synced perfectly. IMAP really is awesome, don't understand the need for a web based (unless I'm at a kiosk, or using some else's machine) to access email when I have a native app.
Apple has nothing to worry about. We were waiting for an iPhone 5, then after the disappointment of only the 4s announcement, we bought my wife an Samsumg galaxy 2, where she previously had a iphone 3. So, we used it for about a week, liked the larger screen, but were appalled with the low quality of the Android interface. Nothing on Android looks or works quite right. Basically, Android pretty much feels like it was coded at gunpoint. There does not seem be any attention to any details in Android, it pretty much feels like "programmer art" in games.
So, we ended up returning the Samsung, paying the $35 restocking fee, and buying an iPhone 4. It just works.
WIMP stands for "window, icon, menu, pointing device", which you have with 11.04
I think what the author is complaining about is that Unity (or Gnome3) are not what I call "windows 95" clones.
We have had this disease in computing ever since Windows 95 that every interface has to look like Windows 95. Think about it, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, KDE, Gnome 2.x were ALL essentially copies of the Windows 95 user interface. (Gnome 1.x was more of a CDE clone). All of these had some basic things like start bar and a "desktop" with files and program links.
So, instead of using the term WIMP, the author should have used something like "Windows 95 based" user interface.
No, I am not particularly fond of Unity, not because its different, in fact a choice between Gnome 2.x or Unity, I would choose Unity. I do however MUCH prefer Gnome 3, its much more polished, consistent, customizable (css/javascript), the workflow is well thought out, and Gnome3 does not use a unified Mac menu thats hacked onto applications that were simply not intended for a unified menu bar.
I for one am ecstatic that we are finally moving away from Windows 95 being the gold standard for user interfaces.
Thats the main reason I bought an iPad-2. I read a lot of scientific papers, there is an absolutely fantastic application (Desktop + iPad sync) called Papers, http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/
Basically, papers manages all your papers, hooks up to google scholar, ACM,..., downloads, archives and searches papers, and syncs up with the iPad version of Papers, and automatically creates a bibtex database.
IBM does need to drop the price of Blue Gene, BUT Blue Gene is absolutely awesome to work on (I use Intrepid). Almost all the rest of the rest of the "supercomputers" out there like Cray are basically just PC clusters.
I tried Unity a while back with 11.04, originally thought it had promise, but was really really rough, but looked like a huge improvement over Gnome 2. Now, back then, the Gnome shell prototypes looked pretty bad so I could sort of see why they wanted to split.
Now that Gnome 3 is out, well its IMO pretty awesome, this is the first fully usable Linux desktop where I think I can completely ditch OSX. Gnome 3 and Unity have a lot of similar features, but the thing is that Gnome3 actually works, AND it is thoroughly thought out.
Sure, Gnome 3 is certainly missing some important bits, like theme / ui control panel and other system control panels.
I'm sure its a huge effort on Canonical's part to develop Unity, but with it so similar to Gnome 3, I think their efforts would make a lot more sense adding the missing bits to Gnome 3, and possibly having their own changes.
In any case, what Linux desperately needs is a unified way to deploy applications. Not sure how exactly Gnome 3 and Unity know what applications to display, i.e what apps to display in their respective application views, but I suspect they are not compatible.
I'd like to be able to develop an app, and have it just plain work with any LInux desktop, like I develop and OSX app, and it just works with any OSX (well ok, just Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard) .
I write complex molecular dynamics code all day, runs on a 1000 node cluster and dynamically load balances across all of them.
I do it all on a 15" MacBookPro with 3-4 or so terminals open (in tabs), with an instance of Emacs holding about 50 buffers. Yup, all I need is a few terminals. On top of this, I usually have a local instance of Emacs with several latex files open. 15" is just fine.
Think about it, your brain can hold 5-6 concurrent thoughts, why do you need more monitors than your brain can keep track of?
QT fakes out the look of the native OS with a "theme". On any platform, you can use any theme, for example, on OSX, I can use a KDE theme.
Problems are this "theme" might look superficially similar to the underlying toolkit, but nothing really works right. On OSX, text is never lined up, drop boxes are always off, toolbars just look weird and alien, QT basically looks kind of Frankenstieny on OSX and Windows. Its what is called the "uncanny valley" effect, where something looks close, but ends up looking just bizarre because countless small inconsistencies. There is no practical way to deal with all these inconsistencies when you fake out the native OS with a theme. The only way to do it right is to use the native controls, which QT DOES NOT.
Basically what I'm saying is that there is no such thing as a decent "cross platform" UI library, the UI is so closely tied to the user experience on a particular platform that you can't abstract it or fake it away as to treat each OS exactly the same.
For example, take a look at Maya, it is probably the only big commercial app written with QT. They use their own theme on every platform, Maya does not even resemble a standard Windows or OSX app -- they don't want to have the user experience I've described above. There are some other commercial apps that use QT, but ONLY on Linux. Skype uses QT on Linux,Cocoa on OSX, and WPF on Windows.
Don't think it really can drop MOC or something like as still be a viable UI library.
Dynamic dispatch is pretty fundamental in event driven UIs, and not sure if C++ can really provide such a concept. Thats why we need more dynamic languages like JScript/Python/Objective-C/C# for this type of programming.
I'm sure there are things C++ is good for, but its not something as dynamic as UIs.
I take it you've never had the pain of using a QT app on OSX, QT is an absolute disaster on OSX, AND looks pretty dated on Win7.
If you want your app to be taken seriously, the UI NEEDS TO BE NATIVE, and thats NOT QT. By native, IU should be WPF on Windows,Win Phone / Cocoa on OSX,iOS and GTK on Gnome and QT on KDE, Java on Android.
UIs need to be native, don't short change your users by giving them something that looks completely alien on every platform other than KDE.
Microsoft achieved and is achieving its world dominance through fear:
A significant majority of Windows users use Windows because Microsoft has managed to convince them that anything different is "scary", anything that does not have a mouse and a start bar is different and scary.
So, Microsoft has a bit of a conundrum on their hands. They convinced people that the only way to interact with a computer is their way, but their way does not make the most sense for tablet computers. If they change their UI to make more sense on a tablet, their goes the main reason most people stick with Windows.
This is the great thing about tablets now: no one choses an Android or IOS tablet based on backwards compatibility, no one choses a current tablet out of fear. All tablets are essentially new to just about all users, so users make a choice out of what they like better: Android or iOS. Without the fear of "not being compatible", Microsoft really does not have anything substantial to sell.
I liked SGU, I liked it a lot. I really liked Rush a lot, I'm a physicist, so I can relate. I really liked the idea of a signal embedded in cosmic background radiation. Mostly I liked the concept of discovering and learning about and ancient starship from a long vanished race.
So, no basically there is not a single sci-fi show left on TV (The Event does not count, even though Laura Innes is hot). Sci-Fi, err Sy-Fy (barf) is all about what now, WWF wrestling, some lame ass reality TV spook hunting plumbers. I'm feeling really ripped off because I just bought a 2 year contract with Dish about 6 months ago, and no there isn't dog shit left to watch. Had I of known how bad Sy-Fy was getting, I never would have bought any TV service.
The Ti-83/4 series are utter garbage, why not develop for the Ti-89? or how about the nSpire? The 89/92/Voyage have absolutely wonderful processors, the Motorola 68000 compared to the dogshit z80 chip in the 83/4?
Only an idiot would use Windows for something critical. Only the crown prince of the kingdom of idiots would refine uranium using Windows?
Honestly, what would posses someone to do something as absolutly insane as controlling a uranium centrifuge using freaking MS Windows????
look at the homepage, http://snap.sonydeveloper.com/
it says SNAP development is currently on hold
Now, when I was checking out the site last night, it was all still there, now for some reason, some CEO type decides axe the project. Wonder if Microsoft got wind of this and forced them to shut it down and re-write in visual basic. Perhaps Microsoft threatened Sony by raising their OEM costs or something?
Ocaml is nice, but it does not have all the advantages of being a first class CLR language, i.e. interop free access to all the other code written in C#.
Face it, functional languages are going to remain a minority for the foreseeable future, that means that you need to place nice with popular languages like C#. If a lot of libraries are already written in C#, its really nice to just use them, like you would with F#, instead of having to wrap a C library as with OCaml, Haskel, Python, etc...
I'm not a MS fan, but the CLR is a really really great idea for cross language compatibility.
As someone in scientific computing, this is phenomenally great news.
If given no constrains, my language of choice would be Mathematica. However, it has numerous faults - hugely expensive, does not run on cluster (well), does not generate native code, difficult to tie together with C code, etc...
I was intrigued with Sun's Fortress, but this has gone nowhere, and it is fundamentally flawed from the start in that it is tied to the JVM, which is no-no when it comes to high performance computing. And with the Oracle takeover, I think its fair to say that Fortress is dead.
I was really excited about F# but the original licensing scared me ("MS shared source" which explicitly forbids use in any commercial application, I'm a graduate student funded by a grant, does that mean my work is commercial? maybe, maybe not, see the problem).
Anyway, there are so many logical concepts that are so easy to express with functional languages that are hugely klugey in traditional procedural languages (with the exception of Smalltalk, I consider most popular languages, certainly anything in the C family including Java more procedural than object oriented).
I'm really hoping F# takes off, I never was a huge fan Python for scientific computing where it seems to be very popular.
I could not agree more!
I've been waiting for gnustep to become usable since the late 1990's and it still is a piece of junk as of a few months ago.
It would appear that the guy at cocotron http://www.cocotron.org/ has done more in a year or so than the gnustep folks have done in 15 years.
I don't get it, the NeXT/Cocoa API is so logically laid out, it should be pretty easy to wrap them around GTK+ and Win32/64, but the gnustep folks are intent are re-inventing the wheel and rolling their own low level widget set. Their approach makes gnustep look just plain bizarre in Gnome and Windows.
SWT has the right approach.
The impression I get from on and off following the gnustep boards is they are intent on duplicating the original OpenStep API, and not faithfully following the new API which is Cocoa.
It really would be awesome to be able to write a cross platform ObjectiveC app (I love ObjectiveC, have since I've learned it on a NeXTStation), but I don't know if the gnustep folks will ever pull their heads out of their own asses.
It looks like Microsoft is starting to fall into its own trap: project the impression that anything "different" than Windows is "scary", "different", and of course "incompatible", so they want to trap people with complacency, after all, most people are really scared of learning anything new and different .
Now with tablets, its a whole new way of computing. The traditional desktop metaphors don't work. So, when someone buys a tablet, chances are they are not looking for something that is exactly the same as their desktop.
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I love the NeSTStep UI. But it has the same problem as Gnome 3, GNUStep is not a Windows 95 clone, so everyone will hate it.
The point I'm trying to make is that for the last almost 20 years, Windows 95 has been held up as the gold standard of UI, for a UI to be accepted, it evidently needs to be a clone of Windows 95. So basically thats why all these people are freaking out over Gnome 3: Gnome 3 is not a clone of Windows 95 so its bad. KDE and Gnome 2 are clones (fairly bad clones in Gnome 2's case) of Windows 95 so they are good.
No, I don't think Gnome 3 is perfect, far from it, but at least it tries to show that you do not have to clone Windows 95 to have a desktop UI.
What is the obsession with Windows 95 being the gold standard on which all desktop environments need to be based???
I for one really like Gnome 3 because it is finally no longer a Windows 95 clone like Gnome 2. I'm sorry to people whose first computer used Windows 95 or any of the other Windows 95 based desktops (like Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, KDE or Gnome 2.x), folks there are other ways to use a computer.
So, Mint took Gnome 3, and made it look like Windows 95 again, freaking great!.
Seriously, WTF would I install an app thats basically a web page to use GMail when I have the built in mail app?
I just enable IMAP on GMail, and all my computers using that account are synced perfectly. IMAP really is awesome, don't understand the need for a web based (unless I'm at a kiosk, or using some else's machine) to access email when I have a native app.
Apple has nothing to worry about. We were waiting for an iPhone 5, then after the disappointment of only the 4s announcement, we bought my wife an Samsumg galaxy 2, where she previously had a iphone 3. So, we used it for about a week, liked the larger screen, but were appalled with the low quality of the Android interface. Nothing on Android looks or works quite right. Basically, Android pretty much feels like it was coded at gunpoint. There does not seem be any attention to any details in Android, it pretty much feels like "programmer art" in games.
So, we ended up returning the Samsung, paying the $35 restocking fee, and buying an iPhone 4. It just works.
WIMP stands for "window, icon, menu, pointing device", which you have with 11.04 I think what the author is complaining about is that Unity (or Gnome3) are not what I call "windows 95" clones. We have had this disease in computing ever since Windows 95 that every interface has to look like Windows 95. Think about it, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, KDE, Gnome 2.x were ALL essentially copies of the Windows 95 user interface. (Gnome 1.x was more of a CDE clone). All of these had some basic things like start bar and a "desktop" with files and program links. So, instead of using the term WIMP, the author should have used something like "Windows 95 based" user interface. No, I am not particularly fond of Unity, not because its different, in fact a choice between Gnome 2.x or Unity, I would choose Unity. I do however MUCH prefer Gnome 3, its much more polished, consistent, customizable (css/javascript), the workflow is well thought out, and Gnome3 does not use a unified Mac menu thats hacked onto applications that were simply not intended for a unified menu bar. I for one am ecstatic that we are finally moving away from Windows 95 being the gold standard for user interfaces.
Thats the main reason I bought an iPad-2. I read a lot of scientific papers, there is an absolutely fantastic application (Desktop + iPad sync) called Papers, http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/
..., downloads, archives and searches papers, and syncs up with the iPad version of Papers, and automatically creates a bibtex database.
Basically, papers manages all your papers, hooks up to google scholar, ACM,
IBM does need to drop the price of Blue Gene, BUT Blue Gene is absolutely awesome to work on (I use Intrepid). Almost all the rest of the rest of the "supercomputers" out there like Cray are basically just PC clusters.
I tried Unity a while back with 11.04, originally thought it had promise, but was really really rough, but looked like a huge improvement over Gnome 2. Now, back then, the Gnome shell prototypes looked pretty bad so I could sort of see why they wanted to split.
Now that Gnome 3 is out, well its IMO pretty awesome, this is the first fully usable Linux desktop where I think I can completely ditch OSX. Gnome 3 and Unity have a lot of similar features, but the thing is that Gnome3 actually works, AND it is thoroughly thought out.
Sure, Gnome 3 is certainly missing some important bits, like theme / ui control panel and other system control panels.
I'm sure its a huge effort on Canonical's part to develop Unity, but with it so similar to Gnome 3, I think their efforts would make a lot more sense adding the missing bits to Gnome 3, and possibly having their own changes.
In any case, what Linux desperately needs is a unified way to deploy applications. Not sure how exactly Gnome 3 and Unity know what applications to display, i.e what apps to display in their respective application views, but I suspect they are not compatible.
I'd like to be able to develop an app, and have it just plain work with any LInux desktop, like I develop and OSX app, and it just works with any OSX (well ok, just Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard) .
I write complex molecular dynamics code all day, runs on a 1000 node cluster and dynamically load balances across all of them.
I do it all on a 15" MacBookPro with 3-4 or so terminals open (in tabs), with an instance of Emacs holding about 50 buffers. Yup, all I need is a few terminals. On top of this, I usually have a local instance of Emacs with several latex files open. 15" is just fine.
Think about it, your brain can hold 5-6 concurrent thoughts, why do you need more monitors than your brain can keep track of?
QT fakes out the look of the native OS with a "theme". On any platform, you can use any theme, for example, on OSX, I can use a KDE theme. Problems are this "theme" might look superficially similar to the underlying toolkit, but nothing really works right. On OSX, text is never lined up, drop boxes are always off, toolbars just look weird and alien, QT basically looks kind of Frankenstieny on OSX and Windows. Its what is called the "uncanny valley" effect, where something looks close, but ends up looking just bizarre because countless small inconsistencies. There is no practical way to deal with all these inconsistencies when you fake out the native OS with a theme. The only way to do it right is to use the native controls, which QT DOES NOT.
Basically what I'm saying is that there is no such thing as a decent "cross platform" UI library, the UI is so closely tied to the user experience on a particular platform that you can't abstract it or fake it away as to treat each OS exactly the same.
For example, take a look at Maya, it is probably the only big commercial app written with QT. They use their own theme on every platform, Maya does not even resemble a standard Windows or OSX app -- they don't want to have the user experience I've described above. There are some other commercial apps that use QT, but ONLY on Linux. Skype uses QT on Linux,Cocoa on OSX, and WPF on Windows.
Don't think it really can drop MOC or something like as still be a viable UI library.
Dynamic dispatch is pretty fundamental in event driven UIs, and not sure if C++ can really provide such a concept. Thats why we need more dynamic languages like JScript/Python/Objective-C/C# for this type of programming.
I'm sure there are things C++ is good for, but its not something as dynamic as UIs.
I take it you've never had the pain of using a QT app on OSX, QT is an absolute disaster on OSX, AND looks pretty dated on Win7. If you want your app to be taken seriously, the UI NEEDS TO BE NATIVE, and thats NOT QT. By native, IU should be WPF on Windows,Win Phone / Cocoa on OSX,iOS and GTK on Gnome and QT on KDE, Java on Android. UIs need to be native, don't short change your users by giving them something that looks completely alien on every platform other than KDE.
Why do Windows users get all kinds of great software like this, now with the source, maybe we can finally get some really great malware for Linux.
Because I don't have an anti-virus, I don't use MS Windows.
Microsoft achieved and is achieving its world dominance through fear:
A significant majority of Windows users use Windows because Microsoft has managed to convince them that anything different is "scary", anything that does not have a mouse and a start bar is different and scary.
So, Microsoft has a bit of a conundrum on their hands. They convinced people that the only way to interact with a computer is their way, but their way does not make the most sense for tablet computers. If they change their UI to make more sense on a tablet, their goes the main reason most people stick with Windows.
This is the great thing about tablets now: no one choses an Android or IOS tablet based on backwards compatibility, no one choses a current tablet out of fear. All tablets are essentially new to just about all users, so users make a choice out of what they like better: Android or iOS. Without the fear of "not being compatible", Microsoft really does not have anything substantial to sell.
Elizabeth Vargas, yummy also.
I liked SGU, I liked it a lot. I really liked Rush a lot, I'm a physicist, so I can relate. I really liked the idea of a signal embedded in cosmic background radiation. Mostly I liked the concept of discovering and learning about and ancient starship from a long vanished race.
So, no basically there is not a single sci-fi show left on TV (The Event does not count, even though Laura Innes is hot). Sci-Fi, err Sy-Fy (barf) is all about what now, WWF wrestling, some lame ass reality TV spook hunting plumbers. I'm feeling really ripped off because I just bought a 2 year contract with Dish about 6 months ago, and no there isn't dog shit left to watch. Had I of known how bad Sy-Fy was getting, I never would have bought any TV service.
The Ti-83/4 series are utter garbage, why not develop for the Ti-89? or how about the nSpire? The 89/92/Voyage have absolutely wonderful processors, the Motorola 68000 compared to the dogshit z80 chip in the 83/4?
Only an idiot would use Windows for something critical. Only the crown prince of the kingdom of idiots would refine uranium using Windows? Honestly, what would posses someone to do something as absolutly insane as controlling a uranium centrifuge using freaking MS Windows????
look at the homepage, http://snap.sonydeveloper.com/
it says SNAP development is currently on hold
Now, when I was checking out the site last night, it was all still there, now for some reason, some CEO type decides axe the project. Wonder if Microsoft got wind of this and forced them to shut it down and re-write in visual basic. Perhaps Microsoft threatened Sony by raising their OEM costs or something?
Yup, all I need is to control my custom fuel injection system. No radio, no sat-nav, no climate control, just six cylinders of tuned exhaust.
Ocaml is nice, but it does not have all the advantages of being a first class CLR language, i.e. interop free access to all the other code written in C#. Face it, functional languages are going to remain a minority for the foreseeable future, that means that you need to place nice with popular languages like C#. If a lot of libraries are already written in C#, its really nice to just use them, like you would with F#, instead of having to wrap a C library as with OCaml, Haskel, Python, etc... I'm not a MS fan, but the CLR is a really really great idea for cross language compatibility.
As someone in scientific computing, this is phenomenally great news.
If given no constrains, my language of choice would be Mathematica. However, it has numerous faults - hugely expensive, does not run on cluster (well), does not generate native code, difficult to tie together with C code, etc...
I was intrigued with Sun's Fortress, but this has gone nowhere, and it is fundamentally flawed from the start in that it is tied to the JVM, which is no-no when it comes to high performance computing. And with the Oracle takeover, I think its fair to say that Fortress is dead.
I was really excited about F# but the original licensing scared me ("MS shared source" which explicitly forbids use in any commercial application, I'm a graduate student funded by a grant, does that mean my work is commercial? maybe, maybe not, see the problem).
Anyway, there are so many logical concepts that are so easy to express with functional languages that are hugely klugey in traditional procedural languages (with the exception of Smalltalk, I consider most popular languages, certainly anything in the C family including Java more procedural than object oriented).
I'm really hoping F# takes off, I never was a huge fan Python for scientific computing where it seems to be very popular.
I could not agree more! I've been waiting for gnustep to become usable since the late 1990's and it still is a piece of junk as of a few months ago. It would appear that the guy at cocotron http://www.cocotron.org/ has done more in a year or so than the gnustep folks have done in 15 years. I don't get it, the NeXT/Cocoa API is so logically laid out, it should be pretty easy to wrap them around GTK+ and Win32/64, but the gnustep folks are intent are re-inventing the wheel and rolling their own low level widget set. Their approach makes gnustep look just plain bizarre in Gnome and Windows. SWT has the right approach. The impression I get from on and off following the gnustep boards is they are intent on duplicating the original OpenStep API, and not faithfully following the new API which is Cocoa. It really would be awesome to be able to write a cross platform ObjectiveC app (I love ObjectiveC, have since I've learned it on a NeXTStation), but I don't know if the gnustep folks will ever pull their heads out of their own asses.
It looks like Microsoft is starting to fall into its own trap: project the impression that anything "different" than Windows is "scary", "different", and of course "incompatible", so they want to trap people with complacency, after all, most people are really scared of learning anything new and different . Now with tablets, its a whole new way of computing. The traditional desktop metaphors don't work. So, when someone buys a tablet, chances are they are not looking for something that is exactly the same as their desktop.