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Ok, so its unlikely I will post at this blog again, it will be left up for the old posts, but I have moved over to wordpress.

Visitors - please update your bookmarks!!

http://whyamistilltyping.wordpress.com

See you on the other side!

I finished CoD4 last night on veteran I am still blown away by a game which, paradoxically, is neither new nor revolutionary in concept or implementation. Full review to follow shortly. I am also in the middle of redesigning the site template and seriously considering moving over to a self hosted wordpress blogging system. Stay tuned :)

Graphical user interfaces have been around for a while now. In the last thirty years the available resolutions to the developers has gotten greater and this inevitably has spawned prettier and cleaner themes, however there is very little in the way of innovation Whilst looking into GUIs, the same tried and tested methods are there. They focus on chiefly on static, menu driven systems and desktops that vary in implementations and design, but rarely innovate.

The Early Years, between 1980 and 1990s was the .com boom for GUI interfaces. For us now its a fascinating time because its strange to think of Microsoft has being anything other than a massive monopolistic corporation that is shoving Vista down our throats. Sure we compute in a world safe in the knowledge that the 'cool' guys use Macs and that Linux is that sexy broad thats always just out of reach of the ordinary guy. But it was not always like this, in the very early years of command line interfaces and dodgy shells the GUI really started in earnest with the Apple Lisa Project. It featured drop down menus and desktop icon spaces and was definitely ahead of its time.

From 1984- 1988 the Operating system market was very healthy, with no fewer than 5 different Operating Systems being released and updated. In the few years since then, several contenders have battled it out trying to assert dominance over the Operating System scene. Some emerged 'victorious' (e.g. Apple, Linux, Microsoft) and others faded into distant memory (e.g. Geoworks, Amiga, IBM's OS/2, QNX, BeOS, Acorn, NeXT and others.) It is not until the early 1990s that things started to get interesting, Windows 3.0/3.1 and NT 3.1 were all released within a few years of each other adding a much need update to the old DOS mode graphics.

Throughout all of this, the basic way in which a workspace environment is structured had not changed, no new interface ideas come forth during this era. The operating systems were very different on a code and design level, but the basic menu / desktop point and click interface was well and truly established by this stage. Recently hardware 3D rendering has taken center stage and is most commonly seen with Vista's Aero Glass effects. Linux is the platform on which the greatest innovation is taking place and this of course is as a result of the openness of the platform - the ability to code / implement anything. Whilst the main two desktop managers (Gnome and KDE) are most widely known and recognized there are many fringe desktop mangers from minimalist (e.g. XFCE, flux/busybox) to the specialist (e.g. enlightenment). Whilst providing a great degree of flexibility and variety, they do not really innovate. An exciting project on Linux, originally started by Novel, forked in 2003 and in March remerged back into Compiz Fusion. This was the Linux answer to 3D rendering and whilst the variety and flexibility of Compiz / Beryl (now Compiz Fusion) are astounding, they still offer very little in the way of innovation, just a LOT of eye candy.

And now, finally, I get to the point of this article - desktop managers and the future (check back in five years for a laugh) of desktop interaction. There are three projects which potentially offer new ways to interact with the desktop are Bumptop's physics enabled desktop, Microsoft's Photosynth and Sun's Project Looking Glass.

Physics - on a desktop?!? Madness?

Bumptop is primarily a desktop icon manager, but its main selling point is that every icon (or groups of icons) can be moved / rotated / thrown around the desktop like a chip on a poker table. An obsessively neat person? No problem, stack your icons by file size, document type or by content.

Having a stressful day a the office? Throw your desktop clutter around until you feel better!

The flexibility of this manager is astounding, but whether it will need a new level of human-machine interaction before it takes off remains to be seen. If you have not yet seen their demo on youtube you definitely should.

Photosynth - Surprisingly innovative

Whilst not normally one to be particularly impressed by Microsoft and their 'technology', I am fascinated by Photosynth. The ability to create 3D objects from a series of photos is definitely an interesting concept, but its the way Photosynth presents the documents that could revolutionise the way we store and view documents in the future. To me, this is what I had in mind when Microsoft were talking about a journalised database filesystem back in the days of longhorn. Whilst this is the main focus of the technology, I was simply stunned at the way in which this project groups media. Regardless the size / dimension or media type, a 3D rendered wall is created of all your documents at the same time. Opening one is as simple as zooming into the image or pdf document. Of particular note was the ability to render books in their entirety and zoom from the outset into a single chapter.

The presentation is ten minutes long and there is no excuse for not watching it! :)

Project Looking Glass - Beware on a Sun-ny day.

I came across this project today and was quite taken with it. Initially it looks like a series of snazzy extension to Compiz, however when you dig a bit deeper you find that there are a handful of rather cool features. Rather than windows minimising to a taskbar, they rotate and stick in a 3D fashion to the sides of the screen.

This gives you not only a stack of windows occupying the minimum of desktop real estate, but a preview of each window at the same time making it the ultimate cross between Alt-Tab and the 'live' preview that hovering over the window gives you in Windows Vista and Compiz Fusion. Whilst the taskbar is used as a window dock, rather than being docked as tabs, widgets with window previews are used to further add to the experience.

Also demonstrated is a media player that allows track / album selection through a slew of rotating CDs with cover art. This looks a really clean way of quickly and easily selecting your music rather than searching through a long list.

Another interesting feature is wallpaper that is different on each desktop space (but part of the same overall picture). In the youtube video, the default deskspace is in the center, when you look at the left or right screens, you see the left or right part of the panoramic wallpaper, a very neat feature.

Credit: Some images from http://toastytech.com/guis/

I previously wrote a brief article about gOS - the new cheap FOSS pc that brings Google Apps combined with Linux to the masses. Interestingly today I came across the 'dev kit' version, for $60 you can buy the motherboard and processor out of this PC which normally retails for > $200. This is a hackers dream as the main criticism with the initial gOS was the fact that it came in a shockingly large ugly case for the size of the internal components. I was sorely tempted to buy it in order to harvest the internals and build it into a slim client. This dev kit would make it a lot easier (and cheaper) to do however its only available in the US at the moment.

An enterprising student from Norway has been coding a top-down view RTS version of VALVe's hit, Half Life 2. It is only in a very early state at the moment, although there is a download (how many mods can claim that ) available along with some screen shots. This initial release is mostly a tech demo demonstrating the developer's idea and hints at how the sides will be split. The UI looks lifted from CoH, so I hope he does not get into any legal difficulty as a result. The overall idea is quite good, but by no means unique as a Halflife 1 mod called Natural Selection combined the best elements of RTS and FPS as early as 2002.

Even still I am curious to see which direction this game will go, however in a market flooded of late with RTS games, it makes me wonder whether being HL2 themed with be enough to maintain peoples' interest past the initial wow factor. On the plus side, Half Life 2 has a great story with a variety of well defined characters which will bode very well for this mod. I am excited at the prospect of commanding squads of rebels and or combine soldiers and it could work out very well even if the game play only mimics Company of Heros in style.

So... the iPhone, a product that has evoked a mixture fanatical praise and unrelenting critism in recent months. I am not one to jump onto trend bandwagons and am a firm believer that early adopters either have unusually high stress tolerance or are so obsessed with being ahead of the curve that they don't mind being the corporate guinea pigs that frequently get screwed over. This is a story that has repeated itself time and time again, the Xbox360, the PS3, the Nokia N95 etc. Equally the early iPhone adopters discovered not only a fairly rapid price drop but discovered at their expense the ruthless tactics Apple was willing to adopt to deter what they say as illegal modification. It has been suggested that apple had to act to curb to unlocking, not only to protect their activation and monthly income streams but also as a contractual obligation towards AT&T who paid for exclusivity.

But anyway this is old news, today I spent about twenty minutes playing with an iPhone at an O2 store and I must say I was impressed. My first thought was that is was a lot smaller than I thought it would be. One of Apple's strongest achievements has always been selling a lifestyle. The cornerstone in this is simplicity and ease of use; a mantra Apple customers have come to expect from Apple's hardware line. In this the iPhone does not fail, from simply outstanding looks and build quality, to a gentle gliding interface which just makes it feel like the UI is gliding on air. The integration with Google apps is also impressive as noted by several reviews. Whilst this is true it is important to note apple are not the first to do this. Infact java based midlets have been available do a while for a variety of platforms. An important caveat to note is that there connectivity features work brilliantly in the confines of the O2 store whilst served by their wifi. Real world performance and charges cannot be factored in but invariably the essential bandwidth required will not always be available and where it is it is likely to be costly, especially given the rather limited data plans included in the contract price.

I was impressed with the iPhone but there is no way I would buy one. Whilst the clean interface and the quality of the engineering may be enough to detract from a lack of more advanced features, it is Apple's policy of stifling F/OSS development coupled with a very poor security model (root/ring0 privileges anyone) which put me off. Apple will continue to develop this young product line and like many I am looking forward to revision two. It's a great looking product, but like a cheap commercial printout, look closely and you are going to see imperfections.

For my readers who do not own a PSP or have not been following the PSP homebrew scene, I should explain this, rather absurd headline. For a few months now, an exploit that allows the downgrading of the PSPs internal software (the firmware) has been in circulation after the accidental inclusion of a 'Pandora' battery by Sony. It would appear that Sony's solution to bricked PSPs would be to flash them through software which puts the PSP into a pseudo development mode. A Sony technician accidentally sent one of these magic batteries back with a customer's PSP and this exploit quickly became viral.

Now anyone can potentially unbrick a previously dead PSP - makes you wish you bought all the cheap 'bricked' PSPs on ebay. People who did must be happy now at the prospect of selling them and making a ten fold profit. But I digress, it would appear that new Sony batteries have been altered so as to stop them being modified to trigger the service mode. Should be interesting to see how they achieved this.

Like the majority of the connected world I carry around at least one USB stick with me. Since I use several computers on a day to day basis, I found the portable apps project an excellent way to take versions of popular programs around. This could be done before although it was very dependent on the types of programs you wish to carry around with you. For example, by default, popular programs such a firefox / thunderbird save their data in the root:\Documents and Settings\Konrad\Application Data\*Mozilla folders*. This clearly would not allow an app installed on a USB stick to be utilised at a different computer because the key information would still be stored on the first system. Its not just mozilla applications either, more programs would rather save data to the application data folder or to the registry than use the old style ini or xml type files. Portable versions of popular apps do just that, they have been modified either to allow data to be stored locally (i.e. in the program directory on the USB stick ) or modified to use xml type data encapsulation again on the local disk.

Enter Portable Apps.com, a central nexus of not only applications but a great little installer and management system. U3 disks are gaining traction despite some worry about the security vulnerabilities they potentially expose. With PortableApps you can use a regular USB stick and have a simple interface that pops up when the disk is mounted providing you with a list of available applications. This system suited me for a while as it was convenient and simple, however as time progressed I found a few key applications missing and the lack of custom launching distinctly annoying.

Quite by accident I found PStart. Whilst not graphically as polished as the PortableApp Suite however it offers a lot more flexibility including simple search and PIM functions. It is also possible to make custom launchers with a plethora of options.

For those who like the functionality of the PortableApps coupled with the flexibility of being able to launch anything with a variety of options, I highly recommend the freeware PStart, I just hope they offer skinning in a future version.

People who have not played Anarchy Online will not get this reference although I still recommend reading it as you will certainly be able to pick up on the nuances. Its a comical take on what each class will learn (usually painfully at someone else's expense) when they get to the Temple Of Three Winds. Enjoy :)

Source Thread.

I found on the VALVe software shop two of the coolest products possible from the VALVe franchise.... a head crab and a vortignout in cute plush fun furry form!! Ideal presents for a geek? I think so...

But enough of the alliterations, I also found plans to make home made headcrabs. At the moment the VALVe store is soldout and whilst we wait in hope for more stock, feel free to try your hand at this.