Author: calum

HIG Facelift

I fiddled around with the online appearance of the draft HIG a bit yesterday… basically created a CSS for it, to try and prettify the raw docbook->HTML output somewhat. Here’s an example of the old and new look.

It’s very much work in progress, as I’m kind of learning about stylesheets and docbook customisation as I’m going along, and there are a few obvious bugs and things I haven’t got to yet. But I hope you’ll already find it a bit easier to read… personally, I’m quite pleased with the tables :)

Hopefully we’ll be able to push out a HIG 2.2 release fairly soon, after which I’d like to see us do a bit of an overhaul on the whole document. IMHO it’s getting too big and wordy, and isn’t really laid out as helpfully as it might be. I’m thinking we might want to focus more on the types of UI that developers are actually trying to create (document editor, applet, desktop preference dialog etc.), rather than have them piece together the information from a chapters about windows, menus, and controls.

But at the end of the day, you’re the people who have to use it… let us know what you think!

All your music?

I suspect the European iPod truth is somewhere inbetween Havoc‘s and Benjamin‘s estimates. I live in Europe too, and despite what Benjamin says, I know very few people whose MP3 player of choice isn’t an iPod. And I for one regularly buy from the iTunes Music Store– the selection of music in the Irish store isn’t great, but the ludicrous price of CDs in Ireland still makes it well worthwhile for certain purchases, and it’s scarily easily when, like me, you’re running iTunes at some point pretty much every day anyway. (And it’s trivial to work around the DRM if you want to, not that I ever have any reason to as I’m only ever playing the music on my Mac or my iPod anyway.)

Route Sixty Sucks

Sounds like Linksys have finally admitted (to some people at least) that their new-ish WAG354G modem/router doesn’t work with the PS2. I’ve been trying to tell them that for months, but this post at linksysinfo.org is about the most informative (and least encouraging) I’ve seen about it so far.

I’m not completely hosed as I can still swap out the Linksys for my old ZyXEL modem (no router) and run a cable downstairs from that straight to the PS2, but that’s not quite the wireless utopia I was hoping for.

Weekends

Busy couple of weekends… last Saturday, since it was a bank holiday, we decided to treat ourselves to a night at the Clarion in town to de-stress from our recent house-moving escapades, making as much use of the facilities as the budget allowed. On Sunday night, we had tickets for a recording of RTÉ’s The Panel, which is always good for a a laugh. And this weekend, we went for an international shopping day-trip… well, okay, we took the train up to Belfast. Dunno if it’s the slightly-more-Scottish-accents or the City Hall that looks a bit like a squashed version of the City Chambers, but it reminded me of Glasgow even more than last time I was there.

Update: Johan points out that Durban City Hall is actually an exact copy of Belfast’s, except that it’s surrounded by palm trees… (or by idiots, as Stephen quipped…)

Send a GEGL

From the Microsoft Office UI blog:

Q: What is “Send a Smile?”

A: There’s a general philosophy Microsoft has been embracing more and more in all of our beta products, which is that people should be able to send one-off comments as easily as possible, while they’re “in the moment.” Windows XP had a “Comments?” link in every dialog box that let you tell us if the dialog was stupid. Previous versions of Office had the same thing.

Send-a-Smile is a related tool that goes a bit further. Anywhere, anytime, someone can click a “smiley face” to tell us they like something or a “frowny face” to tell us they don’t like something. We get a lot of context (with the user’s permission of course), including a screenshot, sometimes a short movie of the last 30 seconds, related documents, etc. There’s another tool called the Office Feedback Tool (also known as “Ebert”) which does a similar thing but with Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down.

All of these tools work on the principal that if someone has to open a newsreader, log onto a newsgroup, type a long message, and send it, we’ll lose a lot of valuable feedback just due to complacency. The idea is to reduce the barrier to entry for sending comments so that we get more data from the “heat of the moment.”

And of course, we have all sorts of tools that help us sort an analyze the feedback on the back-end.

I really like even the simple “Comments?” idea, and it would be cool if GNOME could do something similar in its development releases. It would probably need some sort of toolkit support so it could be easily added to any window or dialog, and easily turned off for the final builds. And of course, the hard part would be analysing all that data. But from the user’s point of view, it would be pretty unobtrusive, and would probably capture that Kodak Moment a lot better than having to go and file a bug report. (Plus, of course, people don’t file bug reports about cool stuff that Just Worked.)

Nexenta

Notwithstanding some (fairly pointless, IMHO) debate about the open-ness or otherwise of having to register for its pilot programme, Nexenta looks like being one of the most exciting projects to spring from OpenSolaris so far.

You want it *what* way?

First day working in my new home office since we moved house and BT got around to switching on our broadband connection again. Still a lot of unpacking and cable untangling to do, but everything worked pretty smoothly otherwise. (Wasn’t brave enough to try getting dual-head working on Ubuntu on my Powerbook, though– don’t know if it’s even possible.)

A couple of nights out last weekend… Harry Hill at Vicar Street on Saturday (my choice), and the Backstreet Boys at The Point on Sunday (Julie’s choice). Harry had his amusing moments, but I’ve seen him do better work, and Julie was seriously unimpressed. BSB were, well, five blokes looking younger than they ought to, singing close harmony 90’s pop songs amidst dry ice, lasers and indoor fireworks. More memorable for the spectacle than the music from my point of view, but Julie went to bed dreaming about Kevin so I guess she enjoyed herself :)