Unity fucking blows! Gnome Shell has potential.

The title may be flame bait but hopefully this will help some fence sitters in their evaluation of Unity and Gnome Shell.

The most significant factor in my statement above is that I think the Gnome Shell developers realized there needed to be a stronger context switch between using applications and managing them. In Gnome Shell when you bring up the launcher or the desktop switcher all of the applications fall away from focus and tile in the center of the screen so that the launcher and desktop switcher can be exposed. At first I found this behavior a bit distracting and figured it was all eye candy but after a while I realized just how brilliant it was.

In Unity the context switch isn't as significant. The launcher comes into view when you need it and hides when you don't. In theory anyway. In reality it's a frustrating game of whack-o-mole. The launcher is never there when you want it and it's always in the way when you don't.

It seems the Gnome developers had a much better grasp of the basic user experience issue at hand. By design or intuition they better understood that you manage applications in a different context than you use them and there was benefit in making that separation more distinct not less.

Gnome Shell certainly has room for improvement but the amount of change required to make it great is significantly less than Unity will need.

Almost a full year no posts!

I'm not at all sure what I'm going to do with this space.

Tomorrow would have been an entire year with no posts if it hadn't been for this one.

I have been posting on Google+ quite a bit but that's certainly no substitute for a blog.

I'm also a bit conflicted about how to focus my energy. Do I post here in a personal space? Or on a blog for my business under my name?

Oh well, when I get it figured out I'll definitely share here.

a lot but I really should blog it and link it there since the Google+ posts fade with time. On the other hand I've consideree

Basic Git Configuration

I recently purchased a new machine and had to configure Git again. The email/user setup it reminds you of but I couldn't remember how to configure color output without some digging. So I decided to share it here just in case anyone else may find it useful.

Browser Profile Backup

While I was trying to configure a specific user profile for a Selenium testing today I accidentally deleted my Firefox profile. At first I thought no big deal, my lap top (the machine I was using), is regularly backed up to an external USB drive attached to the docking station. Unfortunately for some strange reason I chose to exclude the $HOME/.mozilla/ directory that contains the profile.

I use Delicious for bookmarks so it mostly just means re-populating my tools bars and resetting passwords on rarely used sites if I can't remember them, not all that big of a deal really.

Still, I couldn't help but notice how much more I depend on the browser than desktop applications these days.

Ruby On Rails and Selenium wait_for_page

I'm moving my current project's cucumber+webrat testing over to cucumber+webrat+selenium. The biggest issue as I expected was timing problems but a fairly liberal sprinkingling of wait_for_page commands through the relevant methods in web_steps.rb file seems to have fixed most of the issues.

User Centric Design

Everyone fails if the cat's not satisfied!

Command Line Ubuntu Upgrades

I've tried to track this info down a few times in the past and failed. Now that I've found it I figured I'd leave myself a bread crumb trail to find it next time.

http://www.ubuntusolutions.org/2009/04/upgrading-ubuntu-from-the-command-line.html

Google, Go, and Native Client

I may have been a bit slow getting to the party but the obviousness of it really hit me this morning. Google has exposed a few early stage projects that could work together to provide some really interesting options in the future.

Specifically I'm looking at Native Client and Go. Initially I really didn't get Native Client, but when you combine it with a language like Go which is specifically designed to be sand-boxable and have fast compile times you start to get some interesting options.

Google could choose to incorporate the Go language tool chain inside the browser along with Native Client. This would mean that developers wouldn't need to build binaries for every CPU they wanted to target. Instead users could simply visit a web page that would pull down the source and compile it on the fly.

It'll be interesting to see where all of this goes.

The Details of Javascript

I've recently been reading JavaScript: The Good Parts and have found it to be an excellent look at the details of the language itself while ignoring the DOM (which is exactly what I wanted). Then today I ran across this Google Tech Talk by the author, Doug Crockford.

Something Different

Moving forward I'm going to be focusing on the techniques necessary to develop AJAX rich client apps tied to RESTful rails backends for internal business use. In all likely hood I will be providing these applications to users as (single site browser) via Google Chromes application short cuts but my intention is to write code that works on any browser; IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

And now for something different....