Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Davyd calls a spade a spade in the latest Gnome Journal: “A Bar For Your Desk!”

Mad Penguin is only four months into 2006 and is already calling Deskbar “Tool of the Year”. They also gave Deskbar “most useful applet award”, but I presume that there’s less competition in that league.

The digg community, in between debating the definition of “screencast”, said “they took the spotlight idea and put it on crack, fantastic!!”

But my favorite call is still by Luis Villa from before the Deskbar was cool: “the magic applet”.

In comparison, what are people saying about superswitcher:
cool,
cool and
cooooooooool. Roooooooock on. 🙂

For some reason, my first.last@myrealbox.com e-mail address went walkabout for the last three-ish days, but I think that it’s back up now. Apologies if you sent me something important. 🙂

Superswitcher 0.3 is out. The quickie screencast (220KB animated GIF) below isn’t great, but hopefully you get the idea.

What’s your bug-fixing attitude? asks
Mikkel,
Raphaël,
Davyd,
Behdad,
Dobey and
Callum today.
For me, it’s fix bugs first, fix fingers later.

Ah, I jest. That was an (Australian) football accident from a couple of years ago. My buddy Wes has taken some much nicer pictures: Volumes
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6 and
7.

Oh, and in other news, Deskbar 2.14.1 was published. I said that I’d manage the maintenance releases, but I was slack and Raphaël ended up shouldering the burden. And hypocritically, I didn’t code any of the patches, so really my attitude should be listed as meh. 🙁 But I just wanted an excuse to share that photo.

Which reminds me… I’ve been sitting on some superswitcher stuff for quite a while that I should really push out.

Many moons ago, I publicized my first Deskbar screencast. Raphaël got excited, and soon after had contributed many more lines of code than I had ever written. Mikkel had an idea, a mockup and an acronym, and it was good. Users loved us. Bugs were filed, and blown away. And now, we are officially part of GNOME 2.14, due in a couple of days.

Without further ado, introducing the first stable version: the
Deskbar 2.14 screencast (4MB, in Flash). Update: mirrored on Google Pages.

Many thanks to all the contributors. You know who you are.

Update (2006-03-14): In all the excitement, I forgot to show off Beagle Live integration, which totally rocks (Beagle rocks, forgetting does not rock). Thankfully, Bjørn Haagensen made his own screencast (4MB GIF), and Kevin Kubasik mirrored it. You guys rock! I just like to say “rock”.

Update (2006-03-15): I also forgot to mention Epiphany integration, and the Alt-t like shortcuts, but Raf has got things covered. Also check out Ploum’s Epiphany 2.14 cheerleading. Epiphany rocks. 🙂

One of the reasons I prefer Epiphany over Firefox is was that different web sites had different icons, which made it easier to pick them out in superswitcher or the window list (aka taskbar). Another reason is that it didn’t stick “- Mozilla Firefox” at the end of everything, which again makes things easier to pick out. Here’s a thousand words:

Unfortunately, this feature was reported as a bug, and “fixed” (and should the opposing bug now be re-opened??) What’s a poor developer to do?

This little issue seems somewhat apropos of the current debate on Planet GNOME, sparked by Davyd, regarding the “dumbing down” of icons. Again, there are valid arguments for both sides, and again, you can’t please everyone.

More interesting (to me) on the planet were some sexy [1] mock-ups and works-in-progress on futuristic desktops. There’s Novell’s “December” GNOME mocks, Jon “desplesda” Manning’s Lazuli mocks (is Lazuli as in Lapis-Lazuli a play on Topaz?) and Symphony OS’s Grey Paper (PDF). I think that I’ve previously mentioned the Gentle GNOME mocks. Finally, last year I also made some mocks, which was discussed on desktop-devel-list.

[1] Remember – chicks dig linux (courtesy of the wonderfully sounding phrase “yubnub‘s gimyim”).

Update (2006-02-06): tab icons (favicons) as the window icon is available as an Epiphany extension.

Bling:
Compare with last year’s fashions:
And the humble beginnings:

Mikkel exclaims, “Desktop sweetness; your name is deskbar“. Screencasty goodness. What else is there to say?

P.S. Why, the day after going snowboarding (badly), do my abs hurt? I feel like somebody just made me do a hundred sit-ups, out of spite.

Update (2006-02-06): Raphaël (aka kikidonk) has a couple more screenshots. Feel the love when we all link to each other’s blog posts about, well, each other’s blog posts. 🙂

Superswitcher 0.2 is out. Bon appetit.

I’ve moved to Mountain View, California, but I just spent the weekend in Los Angeles, seeing an Aussie Rules football match (!), as part of a “let’s flog Oz” marketing event. The Swans played ugly, ugly football. And got pumped by 60 odd points. Meat pies were $7.50 (US!), but they didn’t offer a five dollar shake.

Steve Irwin (aka the Crocodile Hunter) gave a little show, surrounded by various sharp-toothed meat-eaters. Genius, madness, it’s a fine line, that one. And I spotted Rupert Murdoch wandering around the crowd, somewhat less intimidating in real life (the baggy sweatshirt probably had something to do with that). There was a Daddo, various Aussie movie starlets, and I accidentally sat in the reserved-for-Sydney-Swans-members section and was five bums down from Big Bad Barry Hall himself.

I’ve been at my new job for a week. Don’t want to say too much about it, yet. The side of caution and all that.

In Deskbar news, I ain’t done squat for some weeks now, but Mikkel and Raf are polishing a new UI that’s starting to blossom. I’ll defer to their screenshots here and here.

In related news, Holmes has landed in Beagle’s CVS. As sexy as Spotlight? No, but it’s still pretty schmick.

I came to Canberra in 1996. I left Canberra in 2006, fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much. Good times, good times (sniff).