How would these 720p-class displays (1280x720 WXGA and 1280x1024 SXGA) not admit two Word documents? Word existed in the 640x480 era, and at a nominal 96 dpi, 640 pixels cover 6.67 inches (169 mm), or the width of a US letter or A4 sized page minus standard 1" or 25 mm margins. Heck, back in the day, an XGA+ (1152x870) display was considered two-page.
You forget that applications have changed. Have you actually tried looking at two word documents side by side on a 1280 screen? It's the same with the web -- back when smaller displays were common, pages were designed for smaller pages, but as displays have grown, so has the standard width of a page, which then interferes with the ability of the larger displays to accommodate two pages side-by-side.
What I think both gnome-shell and the metro interface attempt to do is put the task you're involved in at the center of the experience.
But their attempts aren't successful in a lot of cases because a task may use more than one application, and keeping both applications visible provides context to the user. One example is reading a web page and taking notes. This task uses two applications: a web browser and a text editor. Another example is web development: a text editor in one or more window to edit HTML markup, style, script, or a PHP program, and a web browser in another window to view the output. The task involves refreshing the page, inspecting the output, and tweaking the code to make the output more closely resemble the expected output. This task likewise uses more than one application.
Yes -- you're right of course. If an application can't contain your task, then the metro-app=task equation fails. This is where gnome-shell, with its multiple desktops, succeeds. The shell focuses you by stripping away the distraction of panels, etc. but also allows you to set up tasks however you want by using multiple desktops and making it easy to snap windows into place for multi-window use. The way gnome-shell allows the dynamic creation and destruction of desktops also encourages you to think of each desktop as a separate task.
It wouldn't be hard for Windows to follow a similar model, but it seems like they don't really conceive of their desktop as a part of their metro interface at all -- it's just an ugly 2nd cousin of the new interface.
But I imagine we exaggerate the importance of looking at multiple windows at once.
I'd say any task in which you traditionally would have overlapping windows rather than side-by-side windows would be a case where switching between full screen views wouldn't be so bad. The utility of the overlapping windows is to give you an easy way to remember what else you were doing and how to get back to it -- the metaphorical visual "stack" of windows mirroring the "stack" of stuff you're doing -- and both Windows 8 and gnome-shell have fast ways to switch between tasks you were recently doing (getting to your "last" task is especially fast w/ touch on Windows 8).
Finally, I'd add that on most laptops, side-by-side screens aren't really that great: a typical laptop at 1280 or 1360 pixels wide doesn't really allow two standard webpages or word documents to be displayed next to each other, so unless your work involves a terminal or a text editor, it's unlikely the side-by-side windows are all that handy.
Of course, all of this will be different if we can get really big displays -- those will call for whole new UIs, and in those cases, we'll be able to keep lots of windows spread out much more easily -- but for now 1920x1080 is the biggest most of us will be using and even at that resolution, two full applications is the most you'd ever really use side-by-side, and that is the one use case already built into the "metro" interface on windows 8 (albeit with flaws, mentioned earlier, but flaws that presumably could be improved in the next upgrade, much as Vista was fixed with 7).
.... What about if I need a third window open? Or a fourth? Say I need to browse documentation, or crunch numbers on a calculator, or to keep my Pidgin windows open? And I honestly hate having to switch windows, mind you.
To be fair, the windows folks have left the traditional interface there, so you can have windows spread out in the traditional desktop if you want. But I think folks are right that this is ultimately destined to be a "second-class" interface. What gnome-shell did, where they totally killed the traditional gnome, was more intellectually honest.
One or two running applications may be sufficient for some number of users (and I use the same interface myself at times), but why would you take away a paradigm that does so much more and doesn't cause any harm on top?
Well, the traditional interface *does* cause harm. The main complaint I (and many others) had about traditional Windows was that it was constantly interrupting you. Something would flash on the panel, or a window would pop-up with a complaint (from a website, from an OS update, from an IM, what have you). The whole thing seemed designed to constantly remove you from control.
What I think both gnome-shell and the metro interface attempt to do is put the task you're involved in at the center of the experience.
I won't make any claim that it's a step up or that it will succeed in the corporate world. But you have to recognize that there are trade-offs, and that you do gain something by moving away from the traditional DE to the new "Metro" one.
Windows 8 still supports the snappy window mode in the old-style desktop, and it has a way to look at two "apps" side-by-side in the new-world desktop (metro or whatever).
The only obvious problem I've seen is that if you like your browser in the new-world mode, they don't seem set up to let you have *two* browser instances side-by-side, which is obnoxious. You could just go use your browser in the old-world desktop mode, but then you lose all the elegance of the full-screen task-bar-less experience.
As to real coding work -- just use emacs fullscreen and divide your window as many times as you like, all from the keyboard. Why would you bother dragging windows around when you've got buffers!
So my wife just got a Windows 8 touch machine from Asus, and I have to say that two weeks in, it is very nice.
The problem was in the first week. The first night of using the machine it seemed incredible how many usability problems there were. There's no real "how to use this machine" intro when we booted up and the key things you need to do are not intuitive enough that you can just "learn" them right away. Now you might think that's an immediate strike against the UI, but the principle of discoverability is routinely violated by Apple, and there UI's are universally loved (there are tons of secret tricks on Macs that you have to read about to learn and the most radical thing about the iPod was that it had no on button, meaning it wasn't even clear how to start it when you first saw one). Anyway, the lack of an intro was compounded with some software problems -- specifically, there was a bug with the app store so we couldn't download anything at first and had to drop into a windows troubleshooter to clear it up (thanks Google!).
Now that we've got the app store thing ironed out and we've learned the swipey commands, the machine feels really graceful and fast to use. At least as simple to use as my Gnome shell, which I dearly dearly love. It actually has many of the same goals -- apps are always full screen, which is usually what you want, typing to search works nearly *everywhere*, etc. And the touch screen is fun. And if there are apps that haven't been app-ified, you have the old school Windows desktop mode to fall back on.
In short, Windows 8 manages to merge many of the conveniences of iOS devices with many of the conveniences with a full operating system. It's quick and easy to use once you know what you're doing. Slick packaging and attention to detail seem essential, however, and this is where Windows is at a disadvantage compared to Apple, since they don't in fact control the whole user experience. Do we blame Asus or Microsoft for the fact that our machine shipped with a buggy OS and a broken App store? Is Asus or Apple to blame for the fact that the one "intro" video Asus included was just advertising for the machine that showed us how beautiful it could look, and not anything that showed how to use the touch screen interface? It's not entirely clear to me.
At least where I teach, we *are* connected. The school has a website that links to all courses, the grades are all in an online gradebook that families have access to, and on and on.
As with many systems, things aren't as well integrated as they could be. The ecosystem of ways to share is so rich that what we end up having is a cobbled together system where people use what's most comfortable to them -- some use online calendaring for assignments, others use a static web page, others a blog, others email distribution lists, others just use the online gradebook to post things, etc. It's tricky as the tech director to decide when to regulate and enforce a common solution for consistency and when to let the diversity flourish to allow for innovation. In our case, we've standardized on the online gradebook and some form of course website, but that's not to say the other forms don't flourish as well (sometimes well integrated into the required forms, others not).
There are, however, some real downsides.
The biggest downside is putting everything in electronic form gives parents a weird level of insight into our grading process. By allowing them to peek into everything we do, we no longer choose how and when to communicate with parents, and the result ends up being some weird expectations (parents who right in with anger and concern when there kids have a low average early in the semester when we've only graded 2 assignments, etc. etc.). I also find that by having moved everything online and made things much more public, we are ennabling a lot of parents to continue coddling their kids and lowering expectations for them. Certainly it seems like parents expect us to put everything online.
Note: I don't speak for all schools, but I can say that here in the Boston regional area, what I'm describing is not at all exceptional. I work at a charter, but the same kinds of expectations are there at the major public districts that surround our suburban town.
I find that pen is the better choice not because of any particular property of the course material or my transcription thereof, but because of the question of attention.
Over my years in school, I've finely honed the art of doodling -- it keeps me just distracted enough I don't start daydreaming without sucking up my attention so I get lost. It allows me to tune in and out as needed.
There's really no netbook equivalent of doodling, and since, in the vast majority of classes, there will come a time when I'm bored, I'm likely to start doing something like checking my email, reading a blog, or, worse, doing some other work, which is far more distracting than doodling. When I've brought laptops to meetings (haven't done it in classes yet), I've found I often miss important information, which is pretty embarrassing.
Until I figure out how to doodle on a computer, I'll keep it out of the classroom.
Am I the only one who wishes the government in the U.S. would implement something like this?
Don't get me wrong, I speed all the time under the current system, just like everyone else. But the two times in my life I've been pulled over I felt it was unfair -- why? because I knew lots of people (just like me) had gotten away with far worse hundreds of times. If the rates really are unreasonable, there will be a demand to change them once they're universally enforced.
The traffic laws as they now exist are simply an excuse for police to pull over whoever they want to and harass them. Traffic laws are the most common contact citizens in the U.S. anyway have with the law, and the blatant unfairness in traffic laws leads to a general cynicism about the application of laws as a whole.
I for one welcome the day when all our cars have sensors on them and speed limits get automatically enforced. But, far more important, I would love it if sensors on the road could detect tailgating and send tickets for that. That would make me very happy.
For example, there's a preview pane, just as in desktop programs, that allows you to view the contents of an email without opening it.
Can someone enlighten me: wtf does it mean to "view the contents of an email without opening it"? Am I crazy, or is "opening an e-mail" a metaphor for displaying the contents on the screen for viewing?
I'll second the goodness of the coming GNOME.
The first thing I noticed was that they finally made type-ahead searching work right on treeviews. No more "C-f" to search -- now you just start typing in any list or treeview, and you'll get a helpful box showing you what you've typed (a la firefox) and instant selection of your item. Among other things, this makes the much-bemoaned new filechooser much more usable for the keyboard-centric (though C-L is still often faster). The one thing missing from their keyboard search AFAICT is a nice way to search-again (i.e. jump to the next hit) in a list. I instinctively try "C-g" but no luck.
Now there's just one major GTK change I'd like to see implemented soon: selection-via-typing on all drop-down ComboBoxes. I've implemented a hack version of this for my own gtk app because I couldn't stand not having it, but I'd much rather have it built into the toolkit. Everyone I know is used to type-ahead for comboboxes on web forms; I wish they'd make it universal across GTK soon.
At any rate, Ubuntu + GNOME's new release system is making great things happen and happen fast. I imagine a lot of debian users (like me) will make the move soon if they haven't already.
I know this is a long article to read, and I know the slashdot blurb suggests it's about the internet, but if you RTFA, you'll see it barely touches on the internet, and that when it does so it does so in an even-handed way, and that the reporter even goes so far as to suggest that internet porn might help relieve urges rather than encourage them (though the experts quickly say that this is not the case, that porn in fact fans the flames of illicit desire).
Anyway, I'm as anxious as the next guy to talk about the ways the old media likes to attack the new, but in this case, you're way off the mark. The article is mostly a case-study and personal story of one man. If you're looking for an easy anti-internet sexual sensationalism target, you'll have to look elsewhere.
The female characters, on the other hand, are mostly made to be looked at, whether that means pan-ins on flapping skirts or heaving breasts. Of course, many video games now have moved girls from "scenery" (a role I remember them in simple side-scrollers of the past) to fighting subjects, which makes for the often laughable scenario of seeing a woman designed to be done-to (fragile, thin, busty) doing the doing. To make the game playable, they have to make her reasonably powerful, but the power itself is laughable (as is the lack of sports bras!).
When I was trying to figure out how to track ingredients for my own linux-based Gourmet recipe manager, I finally gave up on all systems that tracked amounts of ingredients as useless. Instead, I adopted an interface suggested by my wife. When my recipe manager generates shopping lists, it brings up a two-column view: your shopping list and your "pantry list" (stuff your recipes call for that the program assumes you already have). You can easily drag items from one column to the other and the program will remember the next time.
It relies on you to glance at the "pantry" list and confirm that you really do have the items listed. I know it's not nearly as cool as scanning barcodes, or tracking what size containers things come in, or tracking how much you use based on the recipes you use, but in my mind, it's the only system that makes sense for a real kitchen -- one where food appears and disappears all the time in ways no computer or system can hope to account for.
Schoolbell has a calendar component (schoolbell is a subset of the code for Schooltool, a school administration server being developed with $$ from Mark Shuttleworth). It could be the free-server end of what you want (you said you didn't want a server that cost anything; I assume a free one is okay).
From the webpage:
SchoolBell allows users to manage their personal calendars, group calendars and calendars for resources, e.g., rooms, projectors, etc, via a web interface, or using an iCalendar compliant client such as Mozilla calendar or iCal.
You can:
create users, groups and resources through web forms or bulk import (in CSV format);
view and edit calendars for each user, group or resource using an ICal client;
use the web interface to manage user and group calendars;
Actually, the reason for big buttons (which is what I think you mean by "fischer-price") is simple: Fitts' law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
In other words, it's a hell of a lot easier for a user to press a big button than it is for user to press a small button. (Even better than big buttons are the edges of the screen, which are effectively infinitely wide/tall).
Unless you're on a tiny screen and need to maximize real-estate, you're much better off with big buttons. Hard to believe I know.
(I used to be a fluxbox/ratpoison kind of guy myself, but I've discovered GNOME + good key bindings + F11-to-go-fullscreen-when-I-need-it is really much easier to get around)
Every one of your concerns has been addresesd in the design. It may not be your cup of tea, but do give them a little credit. (Though it wouldn't hurt if they made some of these features more obvious)
When I want to open a folder, I don't want to open every folder before it in the tree -- too many extra clicks.
If you actually use the folder a lot, add a shortcut on your desktop. Otherwise, you can always enter a location with the familiar C-L (and tab completion works).
Similarly, I don't want to have to close all those folders which are open for no reason, again too many clicks. Control-Shift-W will immediately close all ancestors of your folder
How do I quickly go back to the parent folder? Oh, it's in the menu. Three clicks. Alt-Up. Or, if you want to close your current folder as -you do it, Alt-Shift-Up
What if I want to go three folders up? Three menu clicks! Alt-Shift-Up three times
And then there are the problems with the "Filing Cabinet" analogy -- if my filing cabinet at home had well over a thousand folders in it, and happened to also have folders inside folders (and honestly, what kind of a real filing cabinet has nested folders?) then I would take a real long hard look at my life. Computer files transcend real filing cabinets. Granted. But the Gnome HIG acknowledges that when using metaphors (like the desktop), "it is important to neither take the metaphor too literally, nor to extend the metaphor beyond its reasonable use." The guy who wrote this article's just stupid -- the official HIG are much smarter.
Windows get in the way of other windows. Too many windows. Have to move windows around (and find windows that get behind other windows... silly windows) just to copy/move/open/reach a file. Using the Ctl-Shift-Up and Ctl-Shift-Down to
close windows as you open them will help here, as does Ctl-Shift-W, but that's beside the point. One good thing about spatial is that it remembers where you put windows. If you position them in a convenient, non-cluttery way (i.e. camera USB card opens on the right, "Pictures" opens on the left), nautilus will remember forever.
Most of the great little shortcuts I'm used to (yes, from windows) have been removed. Example: I'm in a directory of, say, 10,000 files. I want to get to the one called "testnumber5384.c". I start typing the filename, expecting the file manager to know what I want and automatically jump to the files fitting my typing. Nothing happens. I sort by name, then proceed to scroll through 5,383 other files (an imperfect science at best) before I finally find the file I'm looking for. Sounds like your Gnome is broken. Typing should work as expected, and does for me.
And of course, where the heck are the hidden files in the file chooser??? Forget opening any config files in gedit (not that you would). Hidden files are hidden for a reason -- your average user doesn't want to have their Home directory filled with as many files as they have programs installed. But if you want to see them, there's an obvious option on the very first page of the preferences dialog
Gnome also has a clipboard manager (GNOME Clipboard Manager applet 0.0.1) for the panel which lets you manage the gnome clipboard alone, the selection alone, or both.
I know most of the thinking here will be (predictably) about the fairness of tests and the ability of students to find loopholes (i.e. bugs), but as an English teacher, I wish someone would work on similar software for teaching rather than testing.
There are lots of basic grammatical errors students make repeatedly -- whatever English teachers do to explain these errors has a pretty high rate of failure.
I would welcome a computer program to give students instant feedback on grammar, sentence complexity,etc. Human minds learn incredibly well by trial and error: a good program could help students figure out through repetition what they struggle to learn from explanations.
I used Word's grammar checker for the passive-voice recognition alone in order to help wean myself from Academic-style overuse of the passive voice years ago. Eventually, I learned the kinds of patterns that led me to use unecessary passives and the kinds of revisions I needed to make my writing more solid. But I don't think I would have gotten as proficient as these revisions without the program to help highlight the "errors."
Ccomputers could provide students with feedback that could ultimately be a powerful teaching tool used in tandem with teacher's giving lengthy narrative feedback about the ideas in student writing (I don't believe there's a program that can do this yet). Programs could also allow students to practice writing much more without being limited by the number of papers their teachers can read.
I would love to see an open-source project providing schools with sophisticated writing-feedback software. It's time some of this technology actually goes into creating better teaching tools in classrooms rather than more ETS once-a-year yardsticks.
Re:Have to wonder
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, I think online communities can do a very good job creating social interactions with others, but from the images in the story, it sounds like their interface isn't going to do much good -- bells & whistles that will be slow on old machines and are unlikely to scale up well.
People online communicate best the way people unable to see or speak to one another always have -- via written language. Limiting written interaction to "speech bubbles" in a cartoon church seems a pretty foolish way to create a faith community. Why not work instead with a tried and tested medium like an IRC channel or list-serve?
But of course that kind of innovation wouldn't make it on slashdot. And in fact, I'd bet there are already plenty of clergy ministering to their flocks in this way.
Well, the new MS Office I've seen on XP machines handles styles beautifully. If you get a file that's been set up by a neophyte (i.e. without styles), opening the "Style" manager gets you a list of all the different varieties of formatting that exist in the document -- allowing you to effectively act as if there were styles there all along (the only thing it can't handle nicely is a situation in which the person has put a Tab character at the start of every paragraph; but in that case, you can at least easily do a find and replace on the tab character).
Now don't get me wrong, you're talking to a devoted OO user (for MS documents, at least; for home grown documents, I prefer LyX). But the ability to stylify a document you've gotten from a neophyte is wonderful. I would actually like something even better, so that you could automatically sense that a user had put an extra newline between all paragraphs and a tab character and treat this as a style in itself, since what the user intends is to say put a 12pt space above each paragraph and indent the first line (as a teacher, I get this kind of redundant paragraph formatting from students conditioned to lengthen papers, even though I give word limits instead of page limits to avoid this sort of fiddling). Of course, once we get a great automagic style manager in OO, it won't be so hard for me to add an extra feature like this myself.
Slashdot Mirror
How would these 720p-class displays (1280x720 WXGA and 1280x1024 SXGA) not admit two Word documents? Word existed in the 640x480 era, and at a nominal 96 dpi, 640 pixels cover 6.67 inches (169 mm), or the width of a US letter or A4 sized page minus standard 1" or 25 mm margins. Heck, back in the day, an XGA+ (1152x870) display was considered two-page.
You forget that applications have changed. Have you actually tried looking at two word documents side by side on a 1280 screen? It's the same with the web -- back when smaller displays were common, pages were designed for smaller pages, but as displays have grown, so has the standard width of a page, which then interferes with the ability of the larger displays to accommodate two pages side-by-side.
What I think both gnome-shell and the metro interface attempt to do is put the task you're involved in at the center of the experience.
But their attempts aren't successful in a lot of cases because a task may use more than one application, and keeping both applications visible provides context to the user. One example is reading a web page and taking notes. This task uses two applications: a web browser and a text editor. Another example is web development: a text editor in one or more window to edit HTML markup, style, script, or a PHP program, and a web browser in another window to view the output. The task involves refreshing the page, inspecting the output, and tweaking the code to make the output more closely resemble the expected output. This task likewise uses more than one application.
Yes -- you're right of course. If an application can't contain your task, then the metro-app=task equation fails. This is where gnome-shell, with its multiple desktops, succeeds. The shell focuses you by stripping away the distraction of panels, etc. but also allows you to set up tasks however you want by using multiple desktops and making it easy to snap windows into place for multi-window use. The way gnome-shell allows the dynamic creation and destruction of desktops also encourages you to think of each desktop as a separate task.
It wouldn't be hard for Windows to follow a similar model, but it seems like they don't really conceive of their desktop as a part of their metro interface at all -- it's just an ugly 2nd cousin of the new interface.
But I imagine we exaggerate the importance of looking at multiple windows at once.
I'd say any task in which you traditionally would have overlapping windows rather than side-by-side windows would be a case where switching between full screen views wouldn't be so bad. The utility of the overlapping windows is to give you an easy way to remember what else you were doing and how to get back to it -- the metaphorical visual "stack" of windows mirroring the "stack" of stuff you're doing -- and both Windows 8 and gnome-shell have fast ways to switch between tasks you were recently doing (getting to your "last" task is especially fast w/ touch on Windows 8).
Finally, I'd add that on most laptops, side-by-side screens aren't really that great: a typical laptop at 1280 or 1360 pixels wide doesn't really allow two standard webpages or word documents to be displayed next to each other, so unless your work involves a terminal or a text editor, it's unlikely the side-by-side windows are all that handy.
Of course, all of this will be different if we can get really big displays -- those will call for whole new UIs, and in those cases, we'll be able to keep lots of windows spread out much more easily -- but for now 1920x1080 is the biggest most of us will be using and even at that resolution, two full applications is the most you'd ever really use side-by-side, and that is the one use case already built into the "metro" interface on windows 8 (albeit with flaws, mentioned earlier, but flaws that presumably could be improved in the next upgrade, much as Vista was fixed with 7).
.... What about if I need a third window open? Or a fourth? Say I need to browse documentation, or crunch numbers on a calculator, or to keep my Pidgin windows open? And I honestly hate having to switch windows, mind you.
To be fair, the windows folks have left the traditional interface there, so you can have windows spread out in the traditional desktop if you want. But I think folks are right that this is ultimately destined to be a "second-class" interface. What gnome-shell did, where they totally killed the traditional gnome, was more intellectually honest.
One or two running applications may be sufficient for some number of users (and I use the same interface myself at times), but why would you take away a paradigm that does so much more and doesn't cause any harm on top?
Well, the traditional interface *does* cause harm. The main complaint I (and many others) had about traditional Windows was that it was constantly interrupting you. Something would flash on the panel, or a window would pop-up with a complaint (from a website, from an OS update, from an IM, what have you). The whole thing seemed designed to constantly remove you from control.
What I think both gnome-shell and the metro interface attempt to do is put the task you're involved in at the center of the experience.
I won't make any claim that it's a step up or that it will succeed in the corporate world. But you have to recognize that there are trade-offs, and that you do gain something by moving away from the traditional DE to the new "Metro" one.
Windows 8 still supports the snappy window mode in the old-style desktop, and it has a way to look at two "apps" side-by-side in the new-world desktop (metro or whatever).
The only obvious problem I've seen is that if you like your browser in the new-world mode, they don't seem set up to let you have *two* browser instances side-by-side, which is obnoxious. You could just go use your browser in the old-world desktop mode, but then you lose all the elegance of the full-screen task-bar-less experience.
As to real coding work -- just use emacs fullscreen and divide your window as many times as you like, all from the keyboard. Why would you bother dragging windows around when you've got buffers!
So my wife just got a Windows 8 touch machine from Asus, and I have to say that two weeks in, it is very nice.
The problem was in the first week. The first night of using the machine it seemed incredible how many usability problems there were. There's no real "how to use this machine" intro when we booted up and the key things you need to do are not intuitive enough that you can just "learn" them right away. Now you might think that's an immediate strike against the UI, but the principle of discoverability is routinely violated by Apple, and there UI's are universally loved (there are tons of secret tricks on Macs that you have to read about to learn and the most radical thing about the iPod was that it had no on button, meaning it wasn't even clear how to start it when you first saw one). Anyway, the lack of an intro was compounded with some software problems -- specifically, there was a bug with the app store so we couldn't download anything at first and had to drop into a windows troubleshooter to clear it up (thanks Google!).
Now that we've got the app store thing ironed out and we've learned the swipey commands, the machine feels really graceful and fast to use. At least as simple to use as my Gnome shell, which I dearly dearly love. It actually has many of the same goals -- apps are always full screen, which is usually what you want, typing to search works nearly *everywhere*, etc. And the touch screen is fun. And if there are apps that haven't been app-ified, you have the old school Windows desktop mode to fall back on.
In short, Windows 8 manages to merge many of the conveniences of iOS devices with many of the conveniences with a full operating system. It's quick and easy to use once you know what you're doing. Slick packaging and attention to detail seem essential, however, and this is where Windows is at a disadvantage compared to Apple, since they don't in fact control the whole user experience. Do we blame Asus or Microsoft for the fact that our machine shipped with a buggy OS and a broken App store? Is Asus or Apple to blame for the fact that the one "intro" video Asus included was just advertising for the machine that showed us how beautiful it could look, and not anything that showed how to use the touch screen interface? It's not entirely clear to me.
At least where I teach, we *are* connected. The school has a website that links to all courses, the grades are all in an online gradebook that families have access to, and on and on.
As with many systems, things aren't as well integrated as they could be. The ecosystem of ways to share is so rich that what we end up having is a cobbled together system where people use what's most comfortable to them -- some use online calendaring for assignments, others use a static web page, others a blog, others email distribution lists, others just use the online gradebook to post things, etc. It's tricky as the tech director to decide when to regulate and enforce a common solution for consistency and when to let the diversity flourish to allow for innovation. In our case, we've standardized on the online gradebook and some form of course website, but that's not to say the other forms don't flourish as well (sometimes well integrated into the required forms, others not).
There are, however, some real downsides.
The biggest downside is putting everything in electronic form gives parents a weird level of insight into our grading process. By allowing them to peek into everything we do, we no longer choose how and when to communicate with parents, and the result ends up being some weird expectations (parents who right in with anger and concern when there kids have a low average early in the semester when we've only graded 2 assignments, etc. etc.). I also find that by having moved everything online and made things much more public, we are ennabling a lot of parents to continue coddling their kids and lowering expectations for them. Certainly it seems like parents expect us to put everything online.
Note: I don't speak for all schools, but I can say that here in the Boston regional area, what I'm describing is not at all exceptional. I work at a charter, but the same kinds of expectations are there at the major public districts that surround our suburban town.
I find that pen is the better choice not because of any particular property of the course material or my transcription thereof, but because of the question of attention.
Over my years in school, I've finely honed the art of doodling -- it keeps me just distracted enough I don't start daydreaming without sucking up my attention so I get lost. It allows me to tune in and out as needed.
There's really no netbook equivalent of doodling, and since, in the vast majority of classes, there will come a time when I'm bored, I'm likely to start doing something like checking my email, reading a blog, or, worse, doing some other work, which is far more distracting than doodling. When I've brought laptops to meetings (haven't done it in classes yet), I've found I often miss important information, which is pretty embarrassing.
Until I figure out how to doodle on a computer, I'll keep it out of the classroom.
Am I the only one who wishes the government in the U.S. would implement something like this?
Don't get me wrong, I speed all the time under the current system, just like everyone else. But the two times in my life I've been pulled over I felt it was unfair -- why? because I knew lots of people (just like me) had gotten away with far worse hundreds of times. If the rates really are unreasonable, there will be a demand to change them once they're universally enforced.
The traffic laws as they now exist are simply an excuse for police to pull over whoever they want to and harass them. Traffic laws are the most common contact citizens in the U.S. anyway have with the law, and the blatant unfairness in traffic laws leads to a general cynicism about the application of laws as a whole.
I for one welcome the day when all our cars have sensors on them and speed limits get automatically enforced. But, far more important, I would love it if sensors on the road could detect tailgating and send tickets for that. That would make me very happy.
I installed gvlc + my already existing installations of w32codecs etc. and was able to play with wxvlc /path/to/file.mp4
Ogg not advertised, but available here.
Bittorrent is here: http://mirror.linuxquestions.org:6969/index.html
www.laclinux.org Lately the laptop I've got from them has been out-of-commission, but I'd still recommend them as folks providing linux laptops.
I'll second the goodness of the coming GNOME. The first thing I noticed was that they finally made type-ahead searching work right on treeviews. No more "C-f" to search -- now you just start typing in any list or treeview, and you'll get a helpful box showing you what you've typed (a la firefox) and instant selection of your item. Among other things, this makes the much-bemoaned new filechooser much more usable for the keyboard-centric (though C-L is still often faster). The one thing missing from their keyboard search AFAICT is a nice way to search-again (i.e. jump to the next hit) in a list. I instinctively try "C-g" but no luck.
Now there's just one major GTK change I'd like to see implemented soon: selection-via-typing on all drop-down ComboBoxes. I've implemented a hack version of this for my own gtk app because I couldn't stand not having it, but I'd much rather have it built into the toolkit. Everyone I know is used to type-ahead for comboboxes on web forms; I wish they'd make it universal across GTK soon.
At any rate, Ubuntu + GNOME's new release system is making great things happen and happen fast. I imagine a lot of debian users (like me) will make the move soon if they haven't already.
I know this is a long article to read, and I know the slashdot blurb suggests it's about the internet, but if you RTFA, you'll see it barely touches on the internet, and that when it does so it does so in an even-handed way, and that the reporter even goes so far as to suggest that internet porn might help relieve urges rather than encourage them (though the experts quickly say that this is not the case, that porn in fact fans the flames of illicit desire).
Anyway, I'm as anxious as the next guy to talk about the ways the old media likes to attack the new, but in this case, you're way off the mark. The article is mostly a case-study and personal story of one man. If you're looking for an easy anti-internet sexual sensationalism target, you'll have to look elsewhere.
Not quite. "Ideal" men-as-sexual-objects are certainly muscular, but they're nothing like video game characters. The exaggeration of video-game characters is not really about sex appeal the goal is usually not to turn on the male audience's latent homoeroticism. Rather, the goal is to play to a fantasy of super-masculine power. The male video game character is not the object (the done-to, the looked-at), he is the uber- subject (the all-powerful, all-doing).
The female characters, on the other hand, are mostly made to be looked at, whether that means pan-ins on flapping skirts or heaving breasts. Of course, many video games now have moved girls from "scenery" (a role I remember them in simple side-scrollers of the past) to fighting subjects, which makes for the often laughable scenario of seeing a woman designed to be done-to (fragile, thin, busty) doing the doing. To make the game playable, they have to make her reasonably powerful, but the power itself is laughable (as is the lack of sports bras!).
It relies on you to glance at the "pantry" list and confirm that you really do have the items listed. I know it's not nearly as cool as scanning barcodes, or tracking what size containers things come in, or tracking how much you use based on the recipes you use, but in my mind, it's the only system that makes sense for a real kitchen -- one where food appears and disappears all the time in ways no computer or system can hope to account for.
Schoolbell has a calendar component (schoolbell is a subset of the code for Schooltool, a school administration server being developed with $$ from Mark Shuttleworth). It could be the free-server end of what you want (you said you didn't want a server that cost anything; I assume a free one is okay).
From the webpage:
SchoolBell allows users to manage their personal calendars, group calendars and calendars for resources, e.g., rooms, projectors, etc, via a web interface, or using an iCalendar compliant client such as Mozilla calendar or iCal.
You can:
Once you've got your calendars in ICal format, there are a number of other tools that can help you manage them, such as evolution for users, or pcal to output calendars as postscript.
Actually, the reason for big buttons (which is what I think you mean by "fischer-price") is simple: Fitts' law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
In other words, it's a hell of a lot easier for a user to press a big button than it is for user to press a small button. (Even better than big buttons are the edges of the screen, which are effectively infinitely wide/tall).
Unless you're on a tiny screen and need to maximize real-estate, you're much better off with big buttons. Hard to believe I know.
(I used to be a fluxbox/ratpoison kind of guy myself, but I've discovered GNOME + good key bindings + F11-to-go-fullscreen-when-I-need-it is really much easier to get around)
Why do they bother wasting screen real estate? Two words: Fitts' law (for the more technical, less didactic explanation, here's the wikipedia entry).
Every one of your concerns has been addresesd in the design. It may not be your cup of tea, but do give them a little credit. (Though it wouldn't hurt if they made some of these features more obvious)
If you actually use the folder a lot, add a shortcut on your desktop. Otherwise, you can always enter a location with the familiar C-L (and tab completion works).
Control-Shift-W will immediately close all ancestors of your folder
Alt-Up. Or, if you want to close your current folder as -you do it, Alt-Shift-Up
Alt-Shift-Up three times
Granted. But the Gnome HIG acknowledges that when using metaphors (like the desktop), "it is important to neither take the metaphor too literally, nor to extend the metaphor beyond its reasonable use." The guy who wrote this article's just stupid -- the official HIG are much smarter.
Using the Ctl-Shift-Up and Ctl-Shift-Down to close windows as you open them will help here, as does Ctl-Shift-W, but that's beside the point. One good thing about spatial is that it remembers where you put windows. If you position them in a convenient, non-cluttery way (i.e. camera USB card opens on the right, "Pictures" opens on the left), nautilus will remember forever.
Sounds like your Gnome is broken. Typing should work as expected, and does for me.
Hidden files are hidden for a reason -- your average user doesn't want to have their Home directory filled with as many files as they have programs installed. But if you want to see them, there's an obvious option on the very first page of the preferences dialog
Gnome also has a clipboard manager (GNOME Clipboard Manager applet 0.0.1) for the panel which lets you manage the gnome clipboard alone, the selection alone, or both.
I know most of the thinking here will be (predictably) about the fairness of tests and the ability of students to find loopholes (i.e. bugs), but as an English teacher, I wish someone would work on similar software for teaching rather than testing.
There are lots of basic grammatical errors students make repeatedly -- whatever English teachers do to explain these errors has a pretty high rate of failure.
I would welcome a computer program to give students instant feedback on grammar, sentence complexity ,etc. Human minds learn incredibly well by trial and error: a good program could help students figure out through repetition what they struggle to learn from explanations.
I used Word's grammar checker for the passive-voice recognition alone in order to help wean myself from Academic-style overuse of the passive voice years ago. Eventually, I learned the kinds of patterns that led me to use unecessary passives and the kinds of revisions I needed to make my writing more solid. But I don't think I would have gotten as proficient as these revisions without the program to help highlight the "errors."
Ccomputers could provide students with feedback that could ultimately be a powerful teaching tool used in tandem with teacher's giving lengthy narrative feedback about the ideas in student writing (I don't believe there's a program that can do this yet). Programs could also allow students to practice writing much more without being limited by the number of papers their teachers can read.
I would love to see an open-source project providing schools with sophisticated writing-feedback software. It's time some of this technology actually goes into creating better teaching tools in classrooms rather than more ETS once-a-year yardsticks.
Actually, I think online communities can do a very good job creating social interactions with others, but from the images in the story, it sounds like their interface isn't going to do much good -- bells & whistles that will be slow on old machines and are unlikely to scale up well.
People online communicate best the way people unable to see or speak to one another always have -- via written language. Limiting written interaction to "speech bubbles" in a cartoon church seems a pretty foolish way to create a faith community. Why not work instead with a tried and tested medium like an IRC channel or list-serve?
But of course that kind of innovation wouldn't make it on slashdot. And in fact, I'd bet there are already plenty of clergy ministering to their flocks in this way.
Well, the new MS Office I've seen on XP machines handles styles beautifully. If you get a file that's been set up by a neophyte (i.e. without styles), opening the "Style" manager gets you a list of all the different varieties of formatting that exist in the document -- allowing you to effectively act as if there were styles there all along (the only thing it can't handle nicely is a situation in which the person has put a Tab character at the start of every paragraph; but in that case, you can at least easily do a find and replace on the tab character).
Now don't get me wrong, you're talking to a devoted OO user (for MS documents, at least; for home grown documents, I prefer LyX). But the ability to stylify a document you've gotten from a neophyte is wonderful. I would actually like something even better, so that you could automatically sense that a user had put an extra newline between all paragraphs and a tab character and treat this as a style in itself, since what the user intends is to say put a 12pt space above each paragraph and indent the first line (as a teacher, I get this kind of redundant paragraph formatting from students conditioned to lengthen papers, even though I give word limits instead of page limits to avoid this sort of fiddling). Of course, once we get a great automagic style manager in OO, it won't be so hard for me to add an extra feature like this myself.