Open Source Culture: Problem #1

I like how Canonical decided to be more open about secret projects they work on. At least that they now involve some people outside of Canonical to get feedback is great. I think a lot of problems with the new "Amazon Suggestions" feature could have been avoided like that. Sometimes it just takes an outside perspective to see some problems.

And I don't think it is a problem between Open Source and secret projects. Sometimes this is a much better approach then to be open from the start. It's more about the psychological side than code improvements or testing. Often Projects fail because motivation of the contributors fades away. People just tend to move on as they loose interest.

That's why I really dislike bad comments to some newly released code. It's new, surely it has it's problems, just like anything new has. At least some others seem to share my opinion. I think Jono Bacon put it right on his blog:

The Genesis Of Free Software Projects | jonobacon@home: "when sometime decides to create Free Software either as an individual or as a company, they have the right to create the first iteration of that feature however they choose. Their investment of time, money, or both in building Free Software earns them a right to put together a first cut that meets their needs…this is the very nature of scratching an itch."

Comments like "you should have used X instead!" are just wrong. Especially for things that are open and you get for free. Even more so if the one releasing something didn't event get paid to do so. The only thing these comments do is discouraging someone which cares about free and open software. So people writing such bad things are only discouraging other people to do such tings. You are destroying your own system here.

This is something I still see way too often on blogs. This is really bad for open software ...

Tears of Steel

really cool new Blender movie ...

Skeuomorphism Is Bad

Will Apple's Tacky Software-Design Philosophy Cause A Revolt? | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

The issue is two-fold: first, that traditional visual metaphors no longer translate to modern users; and second, that excessive digital imitation of real-world objects creates confusion among users.

Spherical glass solar energy generator

spherical glass solar energy generator by rawlemon

this is just awesome. Love how it look on that window rendering. This should be used everywhere!

Ubuntu Design: Micro, Macro

Ubuntu Design: Micro, Macro

From the comments (by Sicofante):

Besides that, Ubuntu/Canonical don't seem to be certain what an LTS is about. What's a very experimental feature such as the HUD doing there? How can you play so irresponsibly with features like dodge, completely removing it against any common sense and logical considerations? How can you go back and forth with basic applications like the default music manager? You do things like those with ordinary releases, not LTS releases.

well said. Don't understand that stuff either. Too many basic things changed for this LTS.

Small Details Matter A Lot!

For me, today is one of those sad, sad days. Everything was fine until I did read this blogpost on OMG Ubuntu!. It struck me like lightning. Is it already April the 1st? No. What the hell did happen there? What went wrong. I've been using this happily since it's introduction. It's not a great feature, it's an AWESOME one! This made the Unity Launcher matter to me. Now it's basically back to what every other launcher on every other OS does. Big bummer ...

I still remember very well the first time I stumbled over it. I remember how I played with it and later showed it to my flatmate and told him how awesome this feature is. And he agreed. It was love at first sight. We both use it and we both like it today. Back then it still was buggy, didn't work as expected all the time and had its quirks. But it was a feature that made the launcher stand out from others. At the time we all could see the potential. And I do not think that this potential has suddenly disappeared.

So, Mark Shuttleworth writes on the Ayatana Mailing List a few things on this topic. I do understand the reasoning behind the removal. But, in my opinion, completely axing the feature is a bit extreme. He writes the following:

So, based on that, we made the following design choices:

1. To start with the launcher always visible. This is the least surprising starting position. Nothing happens unless the user commands it. 
2. To expose an option of having the launcher hide, or be fixed.
3. Not to offer a dodge option, because users who don't want it always there are perfectly capable of using it in plain hiding mode, and users who don't know what 'dodge' means don't have to spend time trying to parse it.

Point one is pretty clear, good and what should be the case and is expected. Second point doesn't say much besides "no dodge". Third one is a bit tricky. Yes, users who don't know what "dodge" means shouldn't be confronted with it out of the box (point 1). And, yes, users who use dodge can also use plain hiding mode, as they can use always visible mode (hey, they are advanced users!). But what the hide mode users really want is a good implemented dodge mode! As that's the evolution of simple hiding.

To me, dodge is definitely a feature for advanced users. It's basically an improvement to the always hide mode. It's that small detail that transforms the launcher behavior from good (that it hides) to awesome (that it dodges when it would waste space otherwise). It's nicer and makes one feel like the launcher has some intelligence to it. If I have my desktop visible, I want the launcher to be visible. There is no reason to hide it except laziness of the programmers to implement a better behavior. Especially as likely the next thing I do is launch one of those pinned "important" apps of mine. With a hidden launcher that needs more effort from my side.

There has only been one thing that still is annoying about the dodge feature. In the current release it shows as soon as you touch the left screen edge with you mouse. This is annoying for some programs. Especially graphic applications, like Gimp or Inkscape as they have icon toolbars there. But guess what!? They fixed that by introducing edge resistance (which is awesome too!) in the newest alphas for the next LTS. So now that dodge would have been perfect they axe it completely instead of making it an option for advanced users. Personally, I would rather axe the always hide mode.

A sad, sad day indeed. I just say, details matter and this is one of those details that did matter a lot. And definitely not only to me. This is the additional attention to detail and polish that is needed to make something awesome. I hope they leave it in for the LTS release as an hidden option. Furthermore, I hope someone will add this feature over some Compiz plugin to later versions of Unity. It's been too useful to just disappear completely.

On Code Architecture (.Net, CSharp, WCF and WPF)

Been working on an "educational" project for on of our clients at work. They are migrating to the .Net Framework and CSharp. As an example project that also is useful I (among other co-workers) implemented a nice and simple server-client architecture for an application they need. I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out so far. The project is almost finished and I've had a easy time tracing and fixing bugs as well as implementing some last minute changes. The architectural concept seems to work well.

Nice thing about such a project is that you get time to have a closer look at the architecture. To have lots of (sometimes heated) discussions with different people about it and to really widen your understanding of different concepts. Also its a good time to experiment with things and try different approaches to find out what works well for you. Furthermore, I learned a lot about some .Net technologies I didn't use extensively before. In my opinion the time I spent digging deeper into these was well worth it. I'm convinced that other projects will greatly benefit from my new/improved knowledge.

The architecture is pretty straight forward and I hope for most nothing new. I've known it for some time but never really implemented it as its intended. Mostly due to lack of time/control or the simplicity of projects I've been working on in the past. This project was the chance to once do things the right way. The architecture is layered and consists of a data layer, business layer and a presentation layer.

Data Layer
This layer is pretty dump. Minimal Logic which handles connecting to a "datasource". On our Server side this is the SQL Database using Entity Framework. On the Client side this is the WCF Webservice. The idea here is to simply exchange this layer with an other one to connect to a different source.

Business Layer
Almost all application logic is located within this layer. It uses the data layer to access the needed information. On the server side it handles transformation of the database objects into POCOs which later can be easily sent over the WCF Webservice to the client. Also, it does data validation and security checks. As our client doesn't do much logic it mostly does data caching and management on that side.

Presentation Layer
This is where others interact with the Server/Client. On the server this means the WCF Webservice. This consists of an Interface as well as the implementation that mostly routes everything into the business layer. On the client side this is a bit more heavy. We use WPF (XAML, Behaviors, Converters, Commands, Data binding aso.) for the actual UI and make heavy use of the MVVM (Model - View - View Model) pattern.

This whole architecture created quite an initial time overhead (which I underestimated). But I think that over time this will pay off. Finding bugs, fixing and extending code is so much easier with this consisted architecture. This will save some time in the future.

Sidenote: We use integration builds and unit test the server business layer. I think with ~70+ tests and a 81,9% statement coverage we do pretty well there. More unit tests would be nice but this covers the most important logic of the application.

There is room for improvement but overall I'm pretty satisfied with our results ...

Ubuntu: HUD

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu.

nice, I like that. Especially for menu heavy applications this will be great. Much easier and faster to use ...

Android Design site

Android Developers Blog: Introducing the Android Design site

Android ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) design guidelines .. good step Google :)

Bauhaus and Free Software

The Phrygian Cap

hmmm ... comparing the Free Software movement to Bauhaus in Architecture. Interesting indeed. I'm a fan of both ..

Novacut Pro Video Editor

Novacut Pro Video Editor by Novacut Team — Kickstarter

would be great if this project got the money. They have some great ideas. Editing collaborative in real-time sounds like a lot of fun to me.

Google+ Design

The Google+ project: real life sharing, rethought for the web.

This looks very promising. Sadly I don't have any access to it at the moment. The only thing that I notice is the nice design that's slowly coming out. The Google Search page looks very very nice now. I like the new Top Bar a lot more than the old one.

I just wish Google would integrate things more into Blogger. This would have been nice with Buzz but didn't really happen there. It should be made easy to create a new Blogger post from something in your Feed. Also I would love to see a way to post a daily/weekly/monthly summary on Blogger from Buzz/Twitter/.. At least Chrome has a nice extension to create a post from what ever website you are on. I would rather like this to be more like on Facebook when you post a link into the stream. It would make this look so much nicer. I'm still hoping that this will happen one day.

Google launches Chrome OS

Google launches Chrome OS, says Windows is 'torturing users'

"It's (Windows) torturing everyone in this room. It's a flawed model fundamentally. Chromebooks are a new model that doesn't put the burden of managing the computer on yourself." .. very curious where this whole thing is going to. Sounds not too bad but how does it turn out IRL?

Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity - dislikes

After some days of using Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity on my main machine I present a list of the things I don't like so far.

• The Trash as well as the Applications and Files lenses are featured to prominently in Unity. I don't event remember when I last used the Trash. Its more than enough for it to be somewhere within the filemanager. The lenses can easily be accessed over the top left ubuntu logo with just one additional click. Removing these would give more space to more important things like the apps I really use often and have pinned because of that.
• If you set the virtual desktop size to just one desktop the Workspace Switcher should disappear automagically. Its of no use there and wastes just space. I also would like to see the switcher where the trash is now. IF the two lenses are removed and the switcher is the last part which is "mixed" with my pinned apps it would be better to separate that like the trash is now. (UPDATE: seems to disappear after a restart, nice)
• I still think that the global menu approach is flawed by design. This is, for me at least, the case on OSX as well as in this similar approach. This just introduces new interaction problems as well as problems with different UI toolkits.
• From time to time I still get some graphical glitches. Mostly some images missing (or are for some reason not rendered) here and there. Nothing that makes anything unusable but it looks weird and sometimes even funny. E.g. there are sometimes lines missing in the dash. Or there are sometimes white rectangles over some icons.
• I still need to manually edit the Pulseaudio config file and set "enable-lfe-remixing = yes" for my subwoofer to work with normal stereo sound (like music playback). This is annoying and the only thing I need to edit a config file for (which I hate to do). Normal users will just wonder why the subwoofer doesn't work when they listen to music. This always gives the feel that something is broken and if you don't know what it is it's hard to find this simple fix for it. There are a lot of bug reports on this, problem seems that this is broken on some systems and enabling it by default would cause trouble for these people. There should be a checkbox in the audio preferences to simply enable and disable it.
• Unity itself feels a bit "early". I would like it to feel more like "rock solid" just like gnome did in the past. But I guess thats expected for a first version :). This is not a "bad" point, it's more a "needs to improve" point. And I'm sure it will in future versions ...
• As a developer I dislike that development tools are not as up-to-date as I'd like it. Mono for example or Eclipse. I keep my own copy of eclipse and just don't use mono as a result. Not a situation I like.
• Right now I'm asked three times after each login to unlock my keyring. Don't really know why that happens. But it's annoying .. 

Thats all I can think of right now. I'm getting more and more used to Unity. With that I have to say I even like it more and more. The problems are sometimes a bit annoying but nothing that I would consider a show-stopper. 

Ubuntu Wicoh'an thoughts on Unity

Ubuntu Wicoh'an: My thoughts on Unity

Some good points on unity are raised there.

Overlay Scrollbars in Ubuntu

Overlay Scrollbars in Unity - implementation from Canonical Design on Vimeo.

Nice!! Love how they rethink old UI stuff and improve it so much :).

Gnome 3 no ‘max’ & ‘min’ buttons

Gnome 3 removes ‘max’ and ‘min’ window controls – but why?

I welcome this change. I can totally understand the reasoning behind this change for Gnome 3's Shell. The linked posts are worth a read. I'm sure there are people disliking this as it is a very basic change of something that has been there for a long time. But there are nowadays just better, more intuitive ways to change the window size. And minimizing doesn't make much sense the way Gnome Shell works.

I'm still waiting for the Ubuntu button change to get justified.

Fully Illustrated - The Portfolio of Michael Heald

Illustration | Fully Illustrated - The Portfolio of Michael Heald

man, they produce some amazing artwork. Love the backgrounds of Stenches with the moon and the city. Great work ..

So You Want To Be A Designer

So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List - Aza on Design

very good 5 points. This is what I expect from someone who calls himself a designer..

Ubuntu, Canonical and motivations

Mark Shuttleworth - Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption

very insightful post. Totally true in my opinion as an outsider from Ubuntu/Canonical. I'm just a regular user of Ubuntu and thats just what I see Canonical and the Ubuntu Community do every day. And I love it! Hope they continue for a long long time with that.

Best Part of the long post:

When Ubuntu was conceived, the Linux ecosystem was in a sense fully formed. We had a kernel. We had GNOME and KDE. We had X and libc and GCC and all the other familiar tools. Sure they had bugs and they had shortcomings and they had roadmaps to address them. But there was something missing: sometimes it got articulated as “marketing”, sometimes as “end-user focus”. I remember thinking “that’s what I could bring”. So Ubuntu, and Canonical, have quite explicitly NOT put effort into things which are obviously working quite well, instead, we’ve tried to focus on new ideas and new tools and new components.