Would it be too hard to find a standard way to form installation packages? A meta package which would hold the needed information. Then you could write an OS specific installer which installs the meta packages or converters to convert meta packages to OS specific packages/installers.
I know there are some hard parts to solve like lack of similiar file structure, different executable formats and lack of unified scripting language.. But could this be possible?
Perl can be used on almost any system for meta scripts, file system could be defined using a meta language like $programs.$appname.$executables which would translate to C:/Program files/AppName or/usr/local/bin according to OS specific package handlers.. Well.. Executables should be provided separately unless we are packaging source-only with compilation instructions..
I'm surely not the best man to speculate this - is there anyone who could give a good view on the problems of this kind of approach? It would surely make life a lot easier for the end users if they could install any package with their favourite installer app.. Easy wizard installers for beginners and more complicated but more versatile installers for advanced users..
Your points are all valid but IMO they miss one point on the screen area portion.
Tabs take space from the top of the application. Most computer using people read from top to bottom and thus they constantly have to cognitively skip the tab bar which is quite seldomly used when compared to other items on the screen. So it is not about how mich screen area is wasted but how valuable screen area is wasted. And if you count together the space your mockup's tab row takes with the basic tabs - it is actually even more than the one Evolution button box takes with the basic buttons.
Other think I'd like to point out from the useability point of view: If you place many functions (app swtching & shortcuts) in similiar looking containers (tabs) they become harder to find by eye. On the Evolution mockup all functionally different portions are well separated from each other and presented in a different manner - thus making them easier to spot by eye.
After all, I think they are targetting their product to non-professional users who need more visual clues on the GUI for basic usage instead of powerful and flexible features which take little screen space.
In the 18th century it was just about the same if you had a wife and children or not if you just were wealthy enough and didn't have to work to support your family..
You were the head of the family and nobody else had a damn thing to say about if you spend the night composing or not.. Well.. Try that today and see what happens..;)
What do we need those cheap foreign workers for when we can issue couple these penalties (for nothing - ofcourse) and have an unlimited resource of cheap labour for the next 30,000 years!
The atricle mentions batteries to back up the power. In addition to this all changes can be saved to disk on a separate process so that data lookup and handling won't suffer but you can still build up the database to ram from disk if ram is somehow resetted.
So in fact this would add an "additional" backup process and your data would be even safer than before.
I think the poster meant that flash only is a major sin. Using flash is not a bad idea, but you COULD offer an alternate site for people without the flash plugin. There are lot of people out there who have no possibility, no skill or no will to install a flash plugin even though they might be interested in the site contents.
Why use neat flash to get more customers while at the same time dump possible customers?
I hope this is not a late April Fools'. I think this is the right direction to go since this way you can ease the maintainability of projects, make global structural choices in favor of specific effeciency and users can easily replace any component with a better alternative.
I think the idea of structurally integrated products is rotten from the start since it forces you to stick with the suite. Focusing on better interfaces for data extraction and program to program data exchange is a much more feasible way to achieve integration.
OS products are not currently concidered because there are no companies to support them. When you buy a product, you buy not just the program itself but support, education, quarentee etc which the OS products normally don't have.
Passing a bill like this would probably encourage more companies to support OS products and the economy around them, which in my opinnion is a healthy direction for the software industry.
I don't think any of these bills are meant to push poor OSS in the place of good closed software. In every situation you should evaluate as many alternatives as possible and choose the one that fits best, all things concidered. The current situation just is that we lose all the benefits of OSS as they just simply can't be concidered because of the lack of required support available.
I think that in a situation like this OSS should receive more "special" concideration. This is a question of insight - do you want to take your state/country/economy in the direction of open, safe and evolving software or do you want to swim around in this giant pool of shitty software for another decade just to keep our unhealthy software economy afloat and coding the same mistakes over and over again?
3th dimension is a dimension of depth. our screens can't show depth at all. it is just a flat screen with a flat picture on it.
so everything we are talking about here is just presentation. it is about objects looking smaller and bigger to our eyes. it is about some objects covering other objects.
3d is not the same thing as "moving around freely".
why is it that every time I see a 3d application they have to include this "just walk around" paradigm?
who really wants that? if everybody would want a larger workspace than they can view at a time they could use virtual desktop much bigger than their screen and just pan around with the mouse. now how many people do you see doing that?
we already have a much better option which is called a "workspace". sadly most windows users don't even know what it is.
depth itself is not as braindead idea for a gui as "move freely" is. what i would like to see on a gui from the "3d-world" would be a dynamic resizing and overlaping of responsive workspaces controlled by key shortcuts or mouse gestures.
enlightenment has a slow, static and nonresponsive version of the idea which is nice - but it is slow and static..
i'm talking about realtime performance scaled down workspaces which I can stack four in a screen and still operate in any of them with a keyboard and mouse, press shift-alt-1 and make my workspace 1 full screen with the others aligning like dockapps on the side and still press alt-2 to transfer focus to workspace 2 and write to it while it is scaled to a docapp size.
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Would it be too hard to find a standard way to form installation packages? A meta package which would hold the needed information. Then you could write an OS specific installer which installs the meta packages or converters to convert meta packages to OS specific packages/installers.
/usr/local/bin according to OS specific package handlers.. Well.. Executables should be provided separately unless we are packaging source-only with compilation instructions..
I know there are some hard parts to solve like lack of similiar file structure, different executable formats and lack of unified scripting language.. But could this be possible?
Perl can be used on almost any system for meta scripts, file system could be defined using a meta language like $programs.$appname.$executables which would translate to C:/Program files/AppName or
I'm surely not the best man to speculate this - is there anyone who could give a good view on the problems of this kind of approach? It would surely make life a lot easier for the end users if they could install any package with their favourite installer app.. Easy wizard installers for beginners and more complicated but more versatile installers for advanced users..
Your points are all valid but IMO they miss one point on the screen area portion.
Tabs take space from the top of the application. Most computer using people read from top to bottom and thus they constantly have to cognitively skip the tab bar which is quite seldomly used when compared to other items on the screen. So it is not about how mich screen area is wasted but how valuable screen area is wasted. And if you count together the space your mockup's tab row takes with the basic tabs - it is actually even more than the one Evolution button box takes with the basic buttons.
Other think I'd like to point out from the useability point of view: If you place many functions (app swtching & shortcuts) in similiar looking containers (tabs) they become harder to find by eye. On the Evolution mockup all functionally different portions are well separated from each other and presented in a different manner - thus making them easier to spot by eye.
After all, I think they are targetting their product to non-professional users who need more visual clues on the GUI for basic usage instead of powerful and flexible features which take little screen space.
In the 18th century it was just about the same if you had a wife and children or not if you just were wealthy enough and didn't have to work to support your family..
;)
You were the head of the family and nobody else had a damn thing to say about if you spend the night composing or not.. Well.. Try that today and see what happens..
You are obivously in SCO's side. The word GNU doesn't appear in the article even once.
What do we need those cheap foreign workers for when we can issue couple these penalties (for nothing - ofcourse) and have an unlimited resource of cheap labour for the next 30,000 years!
The atricle mentions batteries to back up the power. In addition to this all changes can be saved to disk on a separate process so that data lookup and handling won't suffer but you can still build up the database to ram from disk if ram is somehow resetted.
So in fact this would add an "additional" backup process and your data would be even safer than before.
I think the poster meant that flash only is a major sin. Using flash is not a bad idea, but you COULD offer an alternate site for people without the flash plugin. There are lot of people out there who have no possibility, no skill or no will to install a flash plugin even though they might be interested in the site contents.
Why use neat flash to get more customers while at the same time dump possible customers?
I hope this is not a late April Fools'. I think this is the right direction to go since this way you can ease the maintainability of projects, make global structural choices in favor of specific effeciency and users can easily replace any component with a better alternative.
I think the idea of structurally integrated products is rotten from the start since it forces you to stick with the suite. Focusing on better interfaces for data extraction and program to program data exchange is a much more feasible way to achieve integration.
Props to the Mozilla team!
OS products are not currently concidered because there are no companies to support them. When you buy a product, you buy not just the program itself but support, education, quarentee etc which the OS products normally don't have.
Passing a bill like this would probably encourage more companies to support OS products and the economy around them, which in my opinnion is a healthy direction for the software industry.
I don't think any of these bills are meant to push poor OSS in the place of good closed software. In every situation you should evaluate as many alternatives as possible and choose the one that fits best, all things concidered. The current situation just is that we lose all the benefits of OSS as they just simply can't be concidered because of the lack of required support available.
I think that in a situation like this OSS should receive more "special" concideration. This is a question of insight - do you want to take your state/country/economy in the direction of open, safe and evolving software or do you want to swim around in this giant pool of shitty software for another decade just to keep our unhealthy software economy afloat and coding the same mistakes over and over again?
3th dimension is a dimension of depth. our screens can't show depth at all. it is just a flat screen with a flat picture on it.
:)
so everything we are talking about here is just presentation. it is about objects looking smaller and bigger to our eyes. it is about some objects covering other objects.
3d is not the same thing as "moving around freely".
why is it that every time I see a 3d application they have to include this "just walk around" paradigm?
who really wants that? if everybody would want a larger workspace than they can view at a time they could use virtual desktop much bigger than their screen and just pan around with the mouse. now how many people do you see doing that?
we already have a much better option which is called a "workspace". sadly most windows users don't even know what it is.
depth itself is not as braindead idea for a gui as "move freely" is. what i would like to see on a gui from the "3d-world" would be a dynamic resizing and overlaping of responsive workspaces controlled by key shortcuts or mouse gestures.
enlightenment has a slow, static and nonresponsive version of the idea which is nice - but it is slow and static..
i'm talking about realtime performance scaled down workspaces which I can stack four in a screen and still operate in any of them with a keyboard and mouse, press shift-alt-1 and make my workspace 1 full screen with the others aligning like dockapps on the side and still press alt-2 to transfer focus to workspace 2 and write to it while it is scaled to a docapp size.
that would be 3d fr me.
now one of you geek guys go implement it! hush!