Mostly OT, but under windows if you hit the WIN-D keybaord combination (that's the windows key, use it like you would use Alt) it hides all your apps, showing you the desktop. Hit it again, and they're back.
Good point. But the problem about WIN-D is that it puts all of your windows back on the desktop. Including those you had minimized when you pressed WIN-D the first time. I usually have more than one app running but I seldom have more than one app on the desktop. That app is usually maximized, the rest are "sleeping" in the taskbar. WIN-D brings them all on the desktop forcing me to minimize just the right ones..
If what the author of this article suggests is implemented, my life would be turning into a living hell. Multiple stacked desktops for file-navigation..? Desktops for file-navigation?
At this time of writing I have a grand total of 4(four) icons on my desktop. Only one of these is a shortcut. I have 12 more shortcuts on my taskbar (so, I use Windows. Sue me.;o) ). One of the more used icons on my desktop is the one opening the dazzling labyrinth that is my file-system.
I've never really caught on to the desktop-concept. Maybe it's just me.. The desktop is the background for the windows opened by the applications I run. The harddisk on the other hand is the storage for my files (filing-cabinet anyone..?).
The desktop is a metaphor for a physical thing. And a bad one at that. As a lot of UI-design books will tell you one should be very careful when trying to use metaphors. Have a look at Interface Hall of Shame for some examples.
Why do the author of the above article seem to think that multiplying an already bad interface will make it better? And even if the metaphor was a good one I've yet to see office-workers with e.g. a desk per client..
The problem with finding the next great interface is that the fundamentals in a computer-system is not about to change. We will have (and need) a lot of files (information split into little logical parts) for a long time to come. There is no way around this. Abstracting the storage-space and placing the files on seperate desktops instead of having them in folders accessible from anywhere does not change this fact.
But I agree..:o) I see tons of really good possibilities open up once we have electronic paper. It was just the idea of "taking more work home" that bothered me..:o)
Then you could really take your work home with you
Oh yes. Just what we need. Another brick on that wheel-barrel that is information overload. You know, there has already been studies that shows that access to work-email from home and work-cellphones are heavily increasing stress-related illnesses.
People need time away from their jobs. Yes, it's possible to work 60-70-80 hour weeks. Just not for a prolonged period of time.
Electronic paper is an über-cool idea. No doubt. But let's not use it for bringing more work into our spare time.
Another annoying thing about it is they way that SOMETIMES, the game pops up a window to tell you when a city completes construction, and sometimes it just starts the next item for you...
This is not a bug. It's a feature. RTFM "City govenors". They sometimes have agendas of their own.
This, combined with the fact that only one city can build a wonder at a time, has caused me to lose out on a wonder when I realized that a population 2 city has been trying to build it for 20 turns when I have plenty of larger cities available.
Again RTFM. You can exclude a city from building wonders (great and small) on their own by adjusting the city-govenor settings.
Software has bugs. Certifying Software Engineers is not going to change that fact.
But that's the point, it WILL change that fact.
Bull! Just because someone gets an engineering certification doesn't mean that s/he starts writing flawless code. It's called "human"... No piece of software has ever been bug-free from day one. Not even TeX, qmail or djbdns.
But I'd be willing to accept liability for the software I write for a price. You want to be able to sue me over bugs? Fine, I want a clear-cut specification up front that does not change ever. You want an extra feature? Fine, write the specs and wait for the current project to finish.
I can see it now. DNA computers will be geneered into every newborn baby to augment memory and what not. Along comes Microsoft and forces producers (read: parents) to put the new embedded Windows DNA on the kid, or else..
Gives Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning...
Of course some parents will opt to put some kind of embedded Linux on the kid. The poor kid then later in life finds that something called GPL is prohibiting him/her to have sex with that gorgeous hunk/babe in the corner café running Win DNA..
What a wonderful new world we have to look forward to.
Hmm.. In three sentences you just killed off freedom of choice.. I don't want to have my files "belonging" to an app. I want to be able to choose my interface for drawing, writing text etc. And I want to be able to use several different tools to manipulate a file.
The reason that Palm "gets away with it" is that it is nothing more than a fancy electronic notebook (I'm not dissing Palm here. I have one myself and I love it). PalmOS on a workstation would be a disaster.
And I disagree with your statement that organizing text and bitmaps differs from AutoCAD (or whatever). Why is it different? The organization of files depends on your work-context. My work is project-based. I therefore organize my documents by project. Others may organize by customer. I would never organize my files by Word or by Excel or whatever.
And it has the IMO great advantage over Qt in that it uses native widgets where possible. Qt draws its own widgets afaik.
Also the Qt-license is very restrictive. wxWindows has a license explicitly allowing the library to be used for commercial purposes.
wxWindows runs on Windows, MacOS (9 and X), GTK(+). Work is underway to implement a universal version of the library to be run on embedded platforms.
wxWindows is open-source. Patches and contributions are highly encouraged. Also the mailing-lists are very active with several of the main developers taking part in the discussion.
I just bought my AMD Athlon XP1800+ and now they release the XP1900+?! I could've had a 70 MHz faster processor if I'd only waited a few weeks! Why oh why didn't I wait? Think of all the time I would have saved if only my processor was that fast!
I absolutely agree. I'm on the home-stretch of The Night's Dawn and I've never read anything like it. 3500+ pages and it's still as exciting as it was on page one..:o)
OK. Yank the hard drive from the computer while it's still on. Now lock the hard drive in a safe. Now try to recover your last hour's worth of changes. Are you implying that all programs should always transparently backup off-site?
No, that's not what I'm implying at all. I'm saying that if and when the I/O fails the program should not crash but it should rather hold on to the users data giving him/her a chance to remedy the problem and try to save again.
OK. Now do something to make the computer swap a lot. Now yank the hard drive. How is the OS supposed to continue in such a situation?
You're being ridiculous. Yanking out a hard-drive is asking for trouble. The discussion was about correctable I/O-failures (disc full, bad floppy etc.). No program can do magic.
How is code supposed to recover from that kind of error without losing data (i.e. the document the user is editing)?
Loss of data due to external failures is not an option. Don't ever trust I/O-operations to complete successfully but trust them to fail gracefully. Your program should do the same. Plain and simple. If you can't hold on to the user's data if and when you I/O fails then it's time to take a look at the design..
When you think about it, that's really weird, since it's one of the few valid TLDs. There's.com,.net,.edu,.mil, and.org.
Excuse me? Are you saying that there is only 5 TLD's (excluding the new TLD's)? I beg to differ. Take a look at DNS & BIND appendix C or at IANA's ccTLD-database. These have been in operation for a good while now.
Haha.. Hahahahahahaa... BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!
That must have been the funniest thing on/. EVER!
Now my sides hurt..:o)
Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 1
Software, however, isn't meant to last. It's meant to take advantage of cutting edge technology RIGHT NOW. You don't write a program to last for 100 years. You write it to last a maximum of 5 (longer for sparse exceptions). That's why software is often so ugly.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what brought us Y2K...
Ehm.. Did you read the article..? The German law firm is not acting on behalf of Adobe. Adobe never hired these guys. So Adobe is in no way responsible for what the law firm does. And I think that we might see some action from Adobe's part against the law firm. At least that's what I'd like to see..:o)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. You're right.. That's weird.. Not you being right, but the other thing.. ;o)
Good point. But the problem about WIN-D is that it puts all of your windows back on the desktop. Including those you had minimized when you pressed WIN-D the first time. I usually have more than one app running but I seldom have more than one app on the desktop. That app is usually maximized, the rest are "sleeping" in the taskbar. WIN-D brings them all on the desktop forcing me to minimize just the right ones..
At this time of writing I have a grand total of 4(four) icons on my desktop. Only one of these is a shortcut. I have 12 more shortcuts on my taskbar (so, I use Windows. Sue me. ;o) ). One of the more used icons on my desktop is the one opening the dazzling labyrinth that is my file-system.
I've never really caught on to the desktop-concept. Maybe it's just me.. The desktop is the background for the windows opened by the applications I run. The harddisk on the other hand is the storage for my files (filing-cabinet anyone..?).
The desktop is a metaphor for a physical thing. And a bad one at that. As a lot of UI-design books will tell you one should be very careful when trying to use metaphors. Have a look at Interface Hall of Shame for some examples.
Why do the author of the above article seem to think that multiplying an already bad interface will make it better? And even if the metaphor was a good one I've yet to see office-workers with e.g. a desk per client..
The problem with finding the next great interface is that the fundamentals in a computer-system is not about to change. We will have (and need) a lot of files (information split into little logical parts) for a long time to come. There is no way around this. Abstracting the storage-space and placing the files on seperate desktops instead of having them in folders accessible from anywhere does not change this fact.
But I agree.. :o) I see tons of really good possibilities open up once we have electronic paper. It was just the idea of "taking more work home" that bothered me.. :o)
Oh yes. Just what we need. Another brick on that wheel-barrel that is information overload. You know, there has already been studies that shows that access to work-email from home and work-cellphones are heavily increasing stress-related illnesses.
People need time away from their jobs. Yes, it's possible to work 60-70-80 hour weeks. Just not for a prolonged period of time.
Electronic paper is an über-cool idea. No doubt. But let's not use it for bringing more work into our spare time.
Or as Einstein himself put it:
"The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know".
They used $100 million on that?! And he already had the balancing wheel-chair. (I've seen that btw, and it's cool..).
But this? This will crash and burn. $3000 for a scooter? Think bike. And you'll even get exercise..
This is a toy for lazy rich guys. Nothing else.
But I'd be willing to accept liability for the software I write for a price. You want to be able to sue me over bugs? Fine, I want a clear-cut specification up front that does not change ever . You want an extra feature? Fine, write the specs and wait for the current project to finish.
Gives Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning...
Of course some parents will opt to put some kind of embedded Linux on the kid. The poor kid then later in life finds that something called GPL is prohibiting him/her to have sex with that gorgeous hunk/babe in the corner café running Win DNA..
What a wonderful new world we have to look forward to.
PS: I'm kidding damn you.. ;o)
Nothing to see here...
The reason that Palm "gets away with it" is that it is nothing more than a fancy electronic notebook (I'm not dissing Palm here. I have one myself and I love it). PalmOS on a workstation would be a disaster.
And I disagree with your statement that organizing text and bitmaps differs from AutoCAD (or whatever). Why is it different? The organization of files depends on your work-context. My work is project-based. I therefore organize my documents by project. Others may organize by customer. I would never organize my files by Word or by Excel or whatever.
And it has the IMO great advantage over Qt in that it uses native widgets where possible. Qt draws its own widgets afaik.
Also the Qt-license is very restrictive. wxWindows has a license explicitly allowing the library to be used for commercial purposes.
wxWindows runs on Windows, MacOS (9 and X), GTK(+). Work is underway to implement a universal version of the library to be run on embedded platforms.
wxWindows is open-source. Patches and contributions are highly encouraged. Also the mailing-lists are very active with several of the main developers taking part in the discussion.
Cancer drug research
Gene research
Protein folding
All of these distributed projects reach into medical research and are as such a bit more useful than searching for ET or cracking RC-5.
My world is in ruins..
Nothing to see here...
I absolutely agree. I'm on the home-stretch of The Night's Dawn and I've never read anything like it. 3500+ pages and it's still as exciting as it was on page one.. :o)
You're being ridiculous. Yanking out a hard-drive is asking for trouble. The discussion was about correctable I/O-failures (disc full, bad floppy etc.). No program can do magic.
...when you have tools like Kazaa and Morpheus? Downloading now @ 140K/sec.. :o)
That's utterly tasteless. Shame on you!
Haha.. Hahahahahahaa... BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!! /. EVER!
:o)
That must have been the funniest thing on
Now my sides hurt..
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what brought us Y2K...
In the rest of the world; feet are what we walk on, miles is some dude named davis and yards are what is on the back side of the houses..
Ehm.. Did you read the article..? The German law firm is not acting on behalf of Adobe. Adobe never hired these guys. So Adobe is in no way responsible for what the law firm does. And I think that we might see some action from Adobe's part against the law firm. At least that's what I'd like to see.. :o)