The UCITA legislation will give them the right. On top of that, it will give them the right to close down your business while they do the search for the unlicensed software. That's why UCITA is so damned scary. Microsoft could do something like temporarily halt a competing business' operations (e.g. Red Hat) looking for pirated software that they know doesn't exist. That's why UCITA is so damned scary.
Somehow I can forsee a burgeoning market for communist-themed porn
Agenda delays developers and hurts themselves
on
Agenda Delayed Again
·
· Score: 3
I ordered a developer edition agenda about a week ago. It has yet to arrive. Why is this bad for agenda? Because open source hackers like me can improve things that are not up to consumer snuff (and agenda doesn't have to a pay a red cent for it). I'm a GUI programmer/designer, and I want to help shape the next generation of PDA UI design. I think that it kicks ass the source code for the interface (which is pretty badly designed from what I've seen and heard) is there for the improving. In fact, I've come up with a way to make the agenda writing system less clunky and more reliable than the Palm's. But I cannot start doing this until I get my damned developer's edition agenda! So Agenda, you want bug fixes, start shipping to people like me, ASAP
Probably the single most evil thing I see happening with the music world is DVD-audio, because we all know that those RIAA bastards will implement music region-encoding. Preventing legally purchased movies unique to a culture from crossing continents is bad enough, but to do the same with music is an obscenity. Music should be free to cross cultural barriers, and that's simply not going to happen with region encoding. Fight the good fight, GNU people!
I'm sorry this sounds like a flame, but from what I've seen over the last year with Ximian/Helix, I'm really not impressed. They've continued to constant UI mistake after constant UI mistake. I'm not talking about things that are a matter of preference, I'm talking about stuff that's cross platform/UI faux pas that no competant professional UI design would ever do. Things that break consistancy, or that could confuse a user and cause them to spend large amounts of time trying to do something simple, or something that would confuse them into making a terrible error. On top of that, Ximian's blind copying of microsoft has duplicated many of the UI design errors microsoft committed long when they intentionally did the exact opposite of apple's well-researched implementations in order to avoid getting sued by Jobs & co. I am seeing fantastic artwork from ximian. I am seeing intense work being done on also sorts of object oriented, CORBA aware goodies. But in all this mish-mash of geek compliant stuff, I am not seeing any empathy with your average user or a desire to build an interface better than any yet created. I know that Ximian more or less doesn't consider usability problems to be problems. Just like Red Hat, or for that matter, just about every other software company on the planet. I've been given no other choice but to strike out on my own and use their source to create a new version of GNOME that addresses these problems. At least the GPL gives me that opportunity (try doing that with Microsoft!). No, I'm not yelling "fork" just to scare people. The code's for the initial release looks promising so far. Hope I can finish it soon.
If you want to talk about environmentally wasteful, you really can't get any worse than AOL. Think about all those non-bio-degradable floppies and CD-ROMs you find in your mailbox, in your magazines and, in the case of most of the Slashdot crowd, in your trashcan. Imagine how many landfills those things take up. And then there's all the resources and pollution involved in creating these things. I'd take IBM's pollution over AOL's any day.
I'm not singling out Mandrake, because their installer and GUI configuration tools currently beat out (in almost all cases) all the other major distributions. Relative to the other popular distributions, Mandrake is the easiest.
However...
Mandrake has still in large part messed up the interface for the installer. The most shining example is the stars. The GUI design rule for image usage is that once the images get small enough, they don't really do a lot of good--Partly because the user's ability to recognize what the image means goes down, and partly because the smaller a button image is, the less it is compliant with Fitts' law. (see http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFit ts.html for more details on Fitts' law). You tend to see the same problem with a lot of M$ toolbar buttons. Some might argue "the tiny green stars you can barely see change color when a configuration is complete. That accounts for something". Wrong. What if the end-user has partial or complete color blindness? Changing the color doesn't do diddley squat. Plus, dynamically changing the appearance of a widget will rarely capture a user's attention. Putting a check mark next to the label for each completed step would work far better. The greatest atrocity I've seen in the mandrake installer is where they use stars (yet again) for things like checkboxes. They have substituted a universal interface element recognized for decades, the square with a big black check mark through the middle, for something as ambiguous as an embossed star.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in Mandrake's stars, but in themselves. What I've essentially seen is a distribution installer that had real promise, but then was sabotaged by the ubiquitous "pretty == usable" falacy that pervades through the linux community. Ironically, it is now debian, traditionally the most user-hostile distribution, that is now showing real usability promise. Progeny has a very well designed, non-ambiguous set of UI widgets designed for usability and not for eye candy.
They also give their value-added configuration tools sensible names, not "Drak" preceeded by some half-recognizable suffix. I take back everything bad I ever said about them. With a bit more hacking on their installer (some of which I hope to do), Progeny could become the desktop distribution of choice.
I have not seen a yopy. I have not played with a Yopy. I cannot fully stand by what I say until I see a real, live yopy and play with it. But from what I can tell from all the people in the linux community buzzing about it, the yopy will not be designed for the true end user. It will be designed for geeks for whom technology is the ends and not the means. A goal and not a tool. We've seen the same exact thing with CE, where the whole point of the technology was "look, you can put a desktop in the palm of your hand! Isn't that cool? Looks, feel, and acts just like the desktop!" Unfortunately, the end-user who does not share the early-adopter blind optimism of us geeks and is not going to buy into the idea of the Yopy if it's simply "Now we can port all those X applications in their exact desktop form to a handheld". Hand held usage is going to have different issues than that of the desktop. Efficient UI design is going to be twice as important because the user will often have to input and extract information in a time critical fashion. If the user can't interact with the UI in such a way that they can boot up and jot down that phone number or directions to the concert in 8 seconds, the handheld will be nothing more than a expensive piece of junk in your pocket. A piece of junk that can play solitaire and run gimp, mind you, but a piece of junk nonetheless. A handheld is also going to have certain constraints a desktop won't. The amount of screen real-estate the UI design has to use drops severly, and the difficulty in accessing an interface element in a fast manner greatly increases. Finally, the only tasks that most end-users have had for handhelds has been stuff like taking down addresses, phone numbers, etc. Stuff that can already be adequately handled by the Palm. New and unique tasks for such a beast as the Yopy will have to be thought up in order to be a justifiable purchase for your non-geek.
When you design a piece of technology that will interact intimately with the user (like GUI's or handhelds), you have to design from the end user backwards. You don't think about what GUI toolkit you use, or how you code it, or what chip you'll use. You look at the user's real tasks at hand. You look at their tolerance for dealing with technological details. You look at what shapes would fit comfortably in a user's pocket. When the guy who designed the palm first set about his task, he didn't think "what gui toolkit am I going to use?" or "how am I going to implement the OS?". The first thing he did was put a block of wood in his pocket and carry it around with him the entire day. The block of wood served as a reference point for how the palm would be implemented. As ideas about how the user would interact with the device formed in this guy's head, the palm slowly turned from a block of wood to the most successful portable technology ever created. It is this kind of "organic" thinking that we need when designing the next generation of handhelds. If yopy wasn't thought of as a block of wood, it will only turn into an expensive brick. Wood floats, bricks sink.
" 'The industry doesn't want [MP3] pushed, and Microsoft and RealNetworks don't want it pushed. The consumer is going to eat what he's given' says David Farber"
" 'Let them eat cake' said Marie Antoinette"
They're well-meaning losers. That's what counts.
on
Bonobo 1.0 released
·
· Score: 2
Note that I say these things as a GNOME hacker. I agree with you that GNOME has a disturbing record for ripping off microsoft. This bothers me mostly because the history of microsoft is one of complete and total disrepect for the end-user and an absolute unwillingness to design graphical user interfaces along lines of good, sound UI design principles that have been established throughout 20 years of scientific testing. And Miguel et. all are trying to pass the usability test by cheating off the stupidest kid in class (namely, Microsoft). I've gotten so upset over this that I'm now forking the GNOME UI. Despite this, the GNOME people are good people who really do want to bring linux to the desktop. Even if they have no clue as to how to do it or what end users really want and need, they give people like me who do understand good UI design access to *all* the source code. Guess what would happen if I took a trip up to Redmond and said "Hi, Bill. Your software is the most user-hostile piece of sh*t ever designed. Give me all the code so that I can do the job your programmers aren't doing and make stuff easy for people to use". He'd tell me to piss off. For all of their faults, the GNOME project won't do that. Open source isn't socialist, because having total control over your code and making everything run on schedule is facism at its best.
I am a usability design guy. I look at how people use computers, what kinds of things trips them up, and what kind of stuff they can understand. All the distribution installers (even ximians installer, even though it isn't really a bona fide OS distribution) have serious UI flaws that can confuse newbies and make them (as well as power users) work far less efficiently. Mandrake has serious issues, Redhat's really f*cked up, Suse ist nicht gut, and progeny's a damned joke. If I were to redesign one of the four's installers so that it was the most user-friendly linux installer ever written (which wouldn't get in the way of true power users), which distribution should I award this honor to? Which one deserves it the most?
How could they forget Murray Bozinski on Riptide, that really awful 80's detective show? You simply can't find a better example of the pimply faced, stringy hair and glasses hacker stereotype than Murray. But you've got to admit, he was pretty cool. Sure, he didn't fly the helicopter. Sure, he didn't have the sexy "Who put that roadkill on your face?" mustache. But he was always performing intrusions into corporate networks to solve crimes.
What if we had to communicate with some weird insect alien civilization that used millions of symbols in some weird pictographic languages? Communicating with them would exhaust UTF-8 unicode in 5 nanoseconds. Or perhaps we make contact with millions of alien civilations? Suppose each civilation had hundreds of regional alphabets like we have right now on earth? We'd have to create something like UTF-64 (at the very least) to keep up. I can see an analogy being drawn to the year 2000 problem, where future generations ask "why the hell did they use only two bytes to represent characters when they knew that we'd eventually make contact?" On the bright side, us 21st century coders who'll be considered dinosaurs well past our prime in 2360 might be thawed from cryogenic suspension to become highly-paid consultants dealing with legacy earth systems.
1. It's a morality play (good vs. evil)
2. Has an nearly all white cast (barring Lando and any aliens)
3. No homosexuals (though bobba fett did hold that blaster kinda funny)
4. Religion (the force)
Maybe instead of criticizing Mac OSX, the linux community should learn from it. Apple is a company that really understands the needs and desires of desktop users (apart from their desire to have cheap machines with lots of compatible peripherals). OSX is graphical unix designed from the ground up. Given, with more than a little help from next. Study what mac users appreciate about the UI. Look at how mac programmers, the best application GUI programmers on the planet, design their apps. See the consistency from one app to the next. Take a look at how the Application Bundle system gives users an easy and clean way to install stuff without blowing other stuff away. Apple does things well that Microsoft does very poorly. If you want to beat Microsoft, learn from Apple.
It would explain all those Cmdr Taco fanclub sites.
GNUStep's greatest feature: Applicatoin Bundles
on
GNUstep On LinuxFocus
·
· Score: 2
The coolest thing about GNUStep is the fact that it deals with application installation the way it should be dealt with: File Bundles. Bundles represent an application as a folder with a.app extension which contains all the necessary resources for the application to work. No more rpm -i and having an app's resources scattered throughtout god knows where. Everythings in a nice, neat folder--Pixmaps, il8n resources, executables, etc. Bundles are truly a superior alternative to the broken packaging systems (dpkg, rpm) that we have today. It doesn't rely on some unrepairable binary database system that spells death for an installation if corrupted. Why package when you can bundle? Less papercuts.
"If They Only Opened Be" (to the tune of "If I Only Had a Brain")
I'd move my windows rapid, and they'd redraw not vapid,
They'd move responsively
I'd get such vast improvement In my mouse's pointer movement
If they only opened Be
My afternoons spent quaking, While simulatenously making
Illegal Mp3's
In multimedia heaven, Not in hell, like X11
If they only opened Be
Oh I, Linux guy, Would thrown my redhat CD in the trash,
If Jean-Louis would GPL the code, I'd ditch Linux--in a flash
No more time I would spend waiting, For massive screen updating
When launching apps concurrently
We'd all be very happy, With an OS far less crappy
If they only opened Be.
1. Many (not all, but many) Linux people do not understand the desktop, nor do they understand end-users, nor do they understand fundamental GUI design concepts. Go to a LUG meeting and ask everyone who knows what "Fitts' Law" is to raise their hands. Few hands if any will be raised. The linux community is approaching the concept of linux on the desktop from a server-based perspective, and this will not work. Mention killing X and immediately your get arguments of how great X's network transparency is. "Linux on the desktop" will not work. A desktop that "just happens to use Linux" will. A successful linux UI will be one that will be designed as if the command line never existed.
2. Standards have to be good standards. They have to be well chosen standards that are done for sound reasons that are based on fundamental usability principles. We're not talking about "you say tomato, I say to-ma-toe" issues, we're talking about stuff that's been proving by the cold, hard science of cognitive psychology and usability labs. As mentioned in #1, most of the people involved with linux don't understand basic usability principles, so they copy others who they think do understand these principles. Unfortunately, the people that they copy are just as much in the dark about designing good UI as they are. I'm talking about Microsoft. Microsoft started off on a bad note in the initial design of windows when they intentionally violated many proven UI design principles just to avoid Apple look-and-feel lawsuits. Throughout the last ten years of computing history, the only consistency microsoft GUI's have had is the consistency with which they have been cluttered, confusing, unintuitive, inefficient, and inconsistent. Everything from cluttering UI widgets with zillions of underline accelerators to MDI windows within windows to adaptive menus that move around on the user have made Windows the textbook case for bad UI design.
I've heard myths of micrsoft usability labs in the Himalayas that have large staffs of highly trained Yeti's with PhD's in design and cognitive psychology. Apparently Microsoft's own programmers have never heard of such myths. Check out the Interface Hall of Shame website. Microsoft is by far the most frequente inductee. I guarantee you that any standards (including any set by the GNOME Foundation) will be nothing more than "Let's go copy Windows". I'm not very optimistic, which is why I'm forking GNOME. The one thing that linux has going for it in the standards department is that people who understand how to craft good standards have the code to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The UCITA legislation will give them the right. On top of that, it will give them the right to close down your business while they do the search for the unlicensed software. That's why UCITA is so damned scary. Microsoft could do something like temporarily halt a competing business' operations (e.g. Red Hat) looking for pirated software that they know doesn't exist. That's why UCITA is so damned scary.
Somehow I can forsee a burgeoning market for communist-themed porn
I ordered a developer edition agenda about a week ago. It has yet to arrive. Why is this bad for agenda? Because open source hackers like me can improve things that are not up to consumer snuff (and agenda doesn't have to a pay a red cent for it). I'm a GUI programmer/designer, and I want to help shape the next generation of PDA UI design. I think that it kicks ass the source code for the interface (which is pretty badly designed from what I've seen and heard) is there for the improving. In fact, I've come up with a way to make the agenda writing system less clunky and more reliable than the Palm's. But I cannot start doing this until I get my damned developer's edition agenda! So Agenda, you want bug fixes, start shipping to people like me, ASAP
Probably the single most evil thing I see happening with the music world is DVD-audio, because we all know that those RIAA bastards will implement music region-encoding. Preventing legally purchased movies unique to a culture from crossing continents is bad enough, but to do the same with music is an obscenity. Music should be free to cross cultural barriers, and that's simply not going to happen with region encoding. Fight the good fight, GNU people!
I'm sorry this sounds like a flame, but from what I've seen over the last year with Ximian/Helix, I'm really not impressed. They've continued to constant UI mistake after constant UI mistake. I'm not talking about things that are a matter of preference, I'm talking about stuff that's cross platform/UI faux pas that no competant professional UI design would ever do. Things that break consistancy, or that could confuse a user and cause them to spend large amounts of time trying to do something simple, or something that would confuse them into making a terrible error. On top of that, Ximian's blind copying of microsoft has duplicated many of the UI design errors microsoft committed long when they intentionally did the exact opposite of apple's well-researched implementations in order to avoid getting sued by Jobs & co. I am seeing fantastic artwork from ximian. I am seeing intense work being done on also sorts of object oriented, CORBA aware goodies. But in all this mish-mash of geek compliant stuff, I am not seeing any empathy with your average user or a desire to build an interface better than any yet created. I know that Ximian more or less doesn't consider usability problems to be problems. Just like Red Hat, or for that matter, just about every other software company on the planet. I've been given no other choice but to strike out on my own and use their source to create a new version of GNOME that addresses these problems. At least the GPL gives me that opportunity (try doing that with Microsoft!). No, I'm not yelling "fork" just to scare people. The code's for the initial release looks promising so far. Hope I can finish it soon.
will it develop a sense of self preservation and crash-land in China?
If you want to talk about environmentally wasteful, you really can't get any worse than AOL. Think about all those non-bio-degradable floppies and CD-ROMs you find in your mailbox, in your magazines and, in the case of most of the Slashdot crowd, in your trashcan. Imagine how many landfills those things take up. And then there's all the resources and pollution involved in creating these things. I'd take IBM's pollution over AOL's any day.
I'm not singling out Mandrake, because their installer and GUI configuration tools currently beat out (in almost all cases) all the other major distributions. Relative to the other popular distributions, Mandrake is the easiest.
t ts.html for more details on Fitts' law). You tend to see the same problem with a lot of M$ toolbar buttons. Some might argue "the tiny green stars you can barely see change color when a configuration is complete. That accounts for something". Wrong. What if the end-user has partial or complete color blindness? Changing the color doesn't do diddley squat. Plus, dynamically changing the appearance of a widget will rarely capture a user's attention. Putting a check mark next to the label for each completed step would work far better. The greatest atrocity I've seen in the mandrake installer is where they use stars (yet again) for things like checkboxes. They have substituted a universal interface element recognized for decades, the square with a big black check mark through the middle, for something as ambiguous as an embossed star.
However...
Mandrake has still in large part messed up the interface for the installer. The most shining example is the stars. The GUI design rule for image usage is that once the images get small enough, they don't really do a lot of good--Partly because the user's ability to recognize what the image means goes down, and partly because the smaller a button image is, the less it is compliant with Fitts' law. (see http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFi
To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in Mandrake's stars, but in themselves. What I've essentially seen is a distribution installer that had real promise, but then was sabotaged by the ubiquitous "pretty == usable" falacy that pervades through the linux community. Ironically, it is now debian, traditionally the most user-hostile distribution, that is now showing real usability promise. Progeny has a very well designed, non-ambiguous set of UI widgets designed for usability and not for eye candy. They also give their value-added configuration tools sensible names, not "Drak" preceeded by some half-recognizable suffix. I take back everything bad I ever said about them. With a bit more hacking on their installer (some of which I hope to do), Progeny could become the desktop distribution of choice.
What will 2600 put on the back of their magazines if payphones go the way of the dinosaur?
John Dvorak has been infected! We must put him down and burn the remains before he infects other computer industry critics.
I have not seen a yopy. I have not played with a Yopy. I cannot fully stand by what I say until I see a real, live yopy and play with it. But from what I can tell from all the people in the linux community buzzing about it, the yopy will not be designed for the true end user. It will be designed for geeks for whom technology is the ends and not the means. A goal and not a tool. We've seen the same exact thing with CE, where the whole point of the technology was "look, you can put a desktop in the palm of your hand! Isn't that cool? Looks, feel, and acts just like the desktop!" Unfortunately, the end-user who does not share the early-adopter blind optimism of us geeks and is not going to buy into the idea of the Yopy if it's simply "Now we can port all those X applications in their exact desktop form to a handheld". Hand held usage is going to have different issues than that of the desktop. Efficient UI design is going to be twice as important because the user will often have to input and extract information in a time critical fashion. If the user can't interact with the UI in such a way that they can boot up and jot down that phone number or directions to the concert in 8 seconds, the handheld will be nothing more than a expensive piece of junk in your pocket. A piece of junk that can play solitaire and run gimp, mind you, but a piece of junk nonetheless. A handheld is also going to have certain constraints a desktop won't. The amount of screen real-estate the UI design has to use drops severly, and the difficulty in accessing an interface element in a fast manner greatly increases. Finally, the only tasks that most end-users have had for handhelds has been stuff like taking down addresses, phone numbers, etc. Stuff that can already be adequately handled by the Palm. New and unique tasks for such a beast as the Yopy will have to be thought up in order to be a justifiable purchase for your non-geek.
When you design a piece of technology that will interact intimately with the user (like GUI's or handhelds), you have to design from the end user backwards. You don't think about what GUI toolkit you use, or how you code it, or what chip you'll use. You look at the user's real tasks at hand. You look at their tolerance for dealing with technological details. You look at what shapes would fit comfortably in a user's pocket. When the guy who designed the palm first set about his task, he didn't think "what gui toolkit am I going to use?" or "how am I going to implement the OS?". The first thing he did was put a block of wood in his pocket and carry it around with him the entire day. The block of wood served as a reference point for how the palm would be implemented. As ideas about how the user would interact with the device formed in this guy's head, the palm slowly turned from a block of wood to the most successful portable technology ever created. It is this kind of "organic" thinking that we need when designing the next generation of handhelds. If yopy wasn't thought of as a block of wood, it will only turn into an expensive brick. Wood floats, bricks sink.
" 'The industry doesn't want [MP3] pushed, and Microsoft and RealNetworks don't want it pushed. The consumer is going to eat what he's given' says David Farber"
" 'Let them eat cake' said Marie Antoinette"
Note that I say these things as a GNOME hacker. I agree with you that GNOME has a disturbing record for ripping off microsoft. This bothers me mostly because the history of microsoft is one of complete and total disrepect for the end-user and an absolute unwillingness to design graphical user interfaces along lines of good, sound UI design principles that have been established throughout 20 years of scientific testing. And Miguel et. all are trying to pass the usability test by cheating off the stupidest kid in class (namely, Microsoft). I've gotten so upset over this that I'm now forking the GNOME UI. Despite this, the GNOME people are good people who really do want to bring linux to the desktop. Even if they have no clue as to how to do it or what end users really want and need, they give people like me who do understand good UI design access to *all* the source code. Guess what would happen if I took a trip up to Redmond and said "Hi, Bill. Your software is the most user-hostile piece of sh*t ever designed. Give me all the code so that I can do the job your programmers aren't doing and make stuff easy for people to use". He'd tell me to piss off. For all of their faults, the GNOME project won't do that. Open source isn't socialist, because having total control over your code and making everything run on schedule is facism at its best.
I am a usability design guy. I look at how people use computers, what kinds of things trips them up, and what kind of stuff they can understand. All the distribution installers (even ximians installer, even though it isn't really a bona fide OS distribution) have serious UI flaws that can confuse newbies and make them (as well as power users) work far less efficiently. Mandrake has serious issues, Redhat's really f*cked up, Suse ist nicht gut, and progeny's a damned joke. If I were to redesign one of the four's installers so that it was the most user-friendly linux installer ever written (which wouldn't get in the way of true power users), which distribution should I award this honor to? Which one deserves it the most?
How could they forget Murray Bozinski on Riptide, that really awful 80's detective show? You simply can't find a better example of the pimply faced, stringy hair and glasses hacker stereotype than Murray. But you've got to admit, he was pretty cool. Sure, he didn't fly the helicopter. Sure, he didn't have the sexy "Who put that roadkill on your face?" mustache. But he was always performing intrusions into corporate networks to solve crimes.
You can give each other incentive to write another hundred lines of code.
I smell an O'reilly book deal in the works: Women in a Nutshell
What if we had to communicate with some weird insect alien civilization that used millions of symbols in some weird pictographic languages? Communicating with them would exhaust UTF-8 unicode in 5 nanoseconds. Or perhaps we make contact with millions of alien civilations? Suppose each civilation had hundreds of regional alphabets like we have right now on earth? We'd have to create something like UTF-64 (at the very least) to keep up. I can see an analogy being drawn to the year 2000 problem, where future generations ask "why the hell did they use only two bytes to represent characters when they knew that we'd eventually make contact?" On the bright side, us 21st century coders who'll be considered dinosaurs well past our prime in 2360 might be thawed from cryogenic suspension to become highly-paid consultants dealing with legacy earth systems.
Think about it.
1. It's a morality play (good vs. evil)
2. Has an nearly all white cast (barring Lando and any aliens)
3. No homosexuals (though bobba fett did hold that blaster kinda funny)
4. Religion (the force)
Maybe instead of criticizing Mac OSX, the linux community should learn from it. Apple is a company that really understands the needs and desires of desktop users (apart from their desire to have cheap machines with lots of compatible peripherals). OSX is graphical unix designed from the ground up. Given, with more than a little help from next. Study what mac users appreciate about the UI. Look at how mac programmers, the best application GUI programmers on the planet, design their apps. See the consistency from one app to the next. Take a look at how the Application Bundle system gives users an easy and clean way to install stuff without blowing other stuff away. Apple does things well that Microsoft does very poorly. If you want to beat Microsoft, learn from Apple.
It would explain all those Cmdr Taco fanclub sites.
The coolest thing about GNUStep is the fact that it deals with application installation the way it should be dealt with: File Bundles. Bundles represent an application as a folder with a .app extension which contains all the necessary resources for the application to work. No more rpm -i and having an app's resources scattered throughtout god knows where. Everythings in a nice, neat folder--Pixmaps, il8n resources, executables, etc. Bundles are truly a superior alternative to the broken packaging systems (dpkg, rpm) that we have today. It doesn't rely on some unrepairable binary database system that spells death for an installation if corrupted. Why package when you can bundle? Less papercuts.
"If They Only Opened Be" (to the tune of "If I Only Had a Brain")
I'd move my windows rapid, and they'd redraw not vapid,
They'd move responsively
I'd get such vast improvement In my mouse's pointer movement
If they only opened Be
My afternoons spent quaking, While simulatenously making
Illegal Mp3's
In multimedia heaven, Not in hell, like X11
If they only opened Be
Oh I, Linux guy, Would thrown my redhat CD in the trash,
If Jean-Louis would GPL the code, I'd ditch Linux--in a flash
No more time I would spend waiting, For massive screen updating
When launching apps concurrently
We'd all be very happy, With an OS far less crappy
If they only opened Be.
1. Many (not all, but many) Linux people do not understand the desktop, nor do they understand end-users, nor do they understand fundamental GUI design concepts. Go to a LUG meeting and ask everyone who knows what "Fitts' Law" is to raise their hands. Few hands if any will be raised. The linux community is approaching the concept of linux on the desktop from a server-based perspective, and this will not work. Mention killing X and immediately your get arguments of how great X's network transparency is. "Linux on the desktop" will not work. A desktop that "just happens to use Linux" will. A successful linux UI will be one that will be designed as if the command line never existed.
2. Standards have to be good standards. They have to be well chosen standards that are done for sound reasons that are based on fundamental usability principles. We're not talking about "you say tomato, I say to-ma-toe" issues, we're talking about stuff that's been proving by the cold, hard science of cognitive psychology and usability labs. As mentioned in #1, most of the people involved with linux don't understand basic usability principles, so they copy others who they think do understand these principles. Unfortunately, the people that they copy are just as much in the dark about designing good UI as they are. I'm talking about Microsoft. Microsoft started off on a bad note in the initial design of windows when they intentionally violated many proven UI design principles just to avoid Apple look-and-feel lawsuits. Throughout the last ten years of computing history, the only consistency microsoft GUI's have had is the consistency with which they have been cluttered, confusing, unintuitive, inefficient, and inconsistent. Everything from cluttering UI widgets with zillions of underline accelerators to MDI windows within windows to adaptive menus that move around on the user have made Windows the textbook case for bad UI design. I've heard myths of micrsoft usability labs in the Himalayas that have large staffs of highly trained Yeti's with PhD's in design and cognitive psychology. Apparently Microsoft's own programmers have never heard of such myths. Check out the Interface Hall of Shame website. Microsoft is by far the most frequente inductee. I guarantee you that any standards (including any set by the GNOME Foundation) will be nothing more than "Let's go copy Windows". I'm not very optimistic, which is why I'm forking GNOME. The one thing that linux has going for it in the standards department is that people who understand how to craft good standards have the code to do so.
It's pining for the fjords.