NVidia drivers updated
NVidia has finally released a 8xxx version of its driver for Linux.
The 7xxx had a serious problem with accelerated render, and was causing random freeze with Xfce WM embedded compositor. The 8xxx version seems to be a lot better in this regard.
So if you use xfwm4’s compositor with NVidia, make sure you get the latest driver from here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
Television
I just watched 5 solid hours of television.
I haven’t watched “real” television since May 7th 1989.
Status
I just quit my job. Whether or not I’ll wind up with a new job in the technology sector remains up in the air. I would prefer not, but it just pays better than any other job you can get with a high school diploma.
That said, I’m hoping to free up some energy for programming efforts I actually like. The problem with working a job in a field that you consider your hobby, is it saps your energy to pursue your real life, and to pursue your hobby as a hobby. Perhaps now Mousepad will get back into shape.
I have a roadmap of sorts for Mousepad. My goal is to get the Mousepad rewrite up to the functionality of the last release. The only real difference should be that Mousepad will be more maintainable than the old Leafpad mess, and potentially faster. This should only take a day or three, should I find the time. This will become the 0.3.0 release. The 0.3.0 “series” (har har) will be the last of “classic” Mousepad.
The goal for the 0.3.0 series is to have a text editor that opens fast, provides no real frills, and has no dependencies outside of those provided by or required for the current stable version of Xfce.
0.3.1 – recent file support. I have a half finished little lib that handles the spec, which I will likely polish off.
0.3.2 – session support. If 4.4 is out, we can just depend on libexo outright, if not, we’ll probably want have a little “miniexo” inside the Mousepad tree.
At this point, I’d like to begin taking Mousepad in a somewhat more feature heavy direction. That may upset some people, who are just looking for a Notepad clone. These people may fork with my blessing. They can move to requiring libexo for session support, using the recent file support that will appear in Gtk+ 2.10, and maybe even using D-bus to keep all Mousepad windows shoehorned in the same process. Up to them. I need a little more from my text editor than that.
The new goal of Mousepad is to be a fast and slim general purpose text editor, much in the vein of BBedit (the classic Macintosh editor) and Nedit (the greatest editor ever that doesn’t use Gtk). Tentatively this is the direction at that point.
0.4.x – Syntax highlighting (with GtkSourceView, or possibly Scintilla)
0.5.x – Tabs.
0.6.0 – Miscellania – templates, open as copy, revert to saved, yadda yadda. The tiny little time savers release.
0.7.0 – Scripts. Little snippets of code in any language which can either process the whole document, or just a selection.
0.8.0+ – The future! GtkSpell, maybe? Toolbar perhaps? A real plugin system? A function browser?
Syntax highlighting and tabs are no brainers as features, and will likely be simple to implement. After that, I’ll need a little input from users, so all of this is subject to change.
A real concern I have is that by adding features I lose what makes Mousepad appealing now (speed, simplicity) while not bringing enough to the table to be useful relative to older text editors (Vi, Emacs, Nedit, or my console editor of choice, Joe), thus bringing the Gedit hell to Xfce. I think I can walk that line. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Trojan Using Sony DRM Rootkit Spotted
Most interesting Slashdot response I’ve ever seen
Flock
Here is what’s cool about this blog post – I’m doing it all with flock.
I think I may do a little review of this new still pre alpha browser. When I first heard of it I was very dubious about it. But after only five minutes of use, I “get” it. Flock may not be the browser for me, even when completed, but I understand the Flock philosophy now, and understand why it’s developers seem so excited.
At heart, Flock seems to be gunning for making the read/write web we were all so excited about 10 years ago but didn’t get. It’s tactic is that sites like del.icio.us and tools like weblogs are effectively adding the write/share features of the old Web vision on top of the current read/display web that we’ve got – so why not make a browser that combines all those things transparently. For example, when I say that I’m blogging this with Flock, I don’t mean that I surfed to the WordPress login with Flock, I mean that I used Flocks built in blogging tool to write this blog – Flock autodetected how to connect to the XML-RPC service that WordPress provides, and is making this post for me. All I needed to do point it at blog.xfce.org and enter my information.
Xfce News Late
So, I’m already up to 8 day weeks, but this next edition of the news will have to wait till next week.
I’ll cover both weeks – sorry about the delay.
Xfce News – September 10th through September 18th, 2005
Sunday, instead of Friday.
Ah well.
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Icons!
I disagree fundamentally with the assumption that icons exist to highlight the “important” bits of the UI.
First off, nine times out of ten, if you have unimportant UI bits you’ve screwed up. Second, if an important bit of UI needs “highlighting” you’ve almost certainly screwed up.
Icons are not workarounds, they are the key to the whole visual metaphor. Several papers have discussed the power of pairing a visual and a lexical stimuli for increasing accuracy and response time in a number of tasks.
Give someone a set of words, and ask them to select the one of them according to a criteria (Like picking the menu item which will save the file from the list of menu options), and it will take them several milliseconds to find it.
Give them a set of images with the same criteria (“Find the toolbar button that saves the document”) and they will take several milliseconds.
Pair the two together (image plus text) and it will take less time to select the menu item.
This makes it pretty clear that eliminating icons throughout the system is a net loss. What is still ambiguous, from a scientific perspective, is what happens in the mixed case – in other words, what is the performance change for the case where “important” bits of the UI have icons and “unimportant” bits do not.
I strongly suspect that performance of selecting a specific “important” item will go up marginally at best (and I could make a strong argument that would theorize performance would plummet, in most cases) and that performance will be so much worse for selecting “unimportant” elements of the UI, that the effect would be a net loss.
I’d be happy to test this out, however, using Gtk+ specifically, if one of you happens to have a grant?
Icons Overload
Lots of people already commenting:
Original by Tigert
Tigert’s blog
Replies:
Garrett LeSage
Benny
I think I agree.
Xfce News, September 2nd through September 9th
Last week’s update seems to have generated a little attention. I’m flattered. The devs aren’t flattered, but that’s because they’re too busy writing 4.4.
I also generated some anonymous criticism of my writing on OSNews. Which was probably warranted. Ah, well. I’ll never get that Linux Weekly News job now.
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