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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/

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.

   

In a refreshingly philanthropic move (especially historically when intellectual property has been involved) Will Wright has donated the original SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child project in the hope that it will inspire a generation of OOTB (out of the box) thinkers. This idea was born from the 'SimCity.edu' project by Don Hopkins, essentially making SimCity into a multiplayer game to help teach Civil and Environmental Engineering running on Linux/X11.

Also, while you are browsing, an old friend of mine told me about 'The Nites', an unsigned band that have some great music on their Myspace. I highly recommend listening!

... and to my regular visitors I promise, the next post will be original content rather than hotlinking. I humbly submit myself for your forgiveness.  

News broke this week of a new sub $200 system being sold in American stores running a 'gOS' distribution of Linux. As it turns out the 'g' is indeed for our overlords Google as the system comes with several Google Apps installed as per default. In the obligatory attached screenshots I noticed a slightly unusual desktop environment running and decided to do some digging. It turns out that the window manager used is the minimalist Enlightenment with a number of tweaks and customisations. gOS is available as a LiveCD which I have now downloaded but not had a chance to try. Seeing some quite impressive screenshots of Enlightenment DR17 in action I decided to take the plunge and try to install it onto my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop. This took about an hour because it has to compile and a lot of the material you find is out of date.

The last official built (E16) was released in 2000/2001 and as a result its horribly out of date. The most recent unstable release is DR17. Unfortunately with this release, it has to be built from CVS although there is a script written by Morlenxus which greatly simplifies the process. Annoyingly, since the last unofficial release was a good few months ago, the default dependencies have either changed, been superseded or have broken. As a result it might take a few attempts before the script completes. I opted for the minimal installation + extra modules.

The first thing I needed to do was add the appropriate sources to my sources.lst. This can be gone either from the GUI or via:

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these lines...

deb http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

deb-src http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17

Save and close. Next you need to download the gpg key for this repository to check the digital signatures of the code downloaded.

wget http://lut1n.ifrance.com/repo_key.asc

sudo apt-key add repo_key.asc

You can now delete this armored key file. Next you will have to update your lists.

sudo apt-get update

SIDE NOTE: According to ubuntugeek, all that is now required is the command 'sudo apt-get install e17' however this is not how I did it so I can not attest to this working.

Next I downloaded and installed some required dependancies to make sure they were all present on my system.

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 libx11-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libfreetype6-dev

libssl-dev zlib1g-dev xlibmesa-dev xlibmesa-gl-dev libxine-dev libtag1-dev libxml2-dev

automake autogen libsqlite3-dev libtagc0-dev

Now I downloaded the rather good script by Morlenxus using the following command. Make sure you are in your home directory for this. (If you are not sure use the command pwd)

wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh

Now make the script executable.

chmod +x easy_e17.sh

According to the official instructions, the next command entered should be './easy_e17.sh -i' this would by default install E17 with all the modules and dependencies This did not work for me for the reasons described above so instead I used the following command.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,elitaire,

emphasis,empower,engycad,scrot,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,extrackt,

engage,enthrall,rage,emu,flame,moon,rain,screenshot,snow,language,mixer

This will omit the troublesome packages. If you still have problems then you can try installing just E17.

./easy_e17.sh -i --skip=imlib2,edb,emotion,entrance,eclair,evfs,edje_viewer,edje_editor,elicit,evolve,e_dbus,

elitaire,emphasis,empower,engycad,entrance_edit_gui,entropy,scrot,ephoto,estickies,exhibit,expedite,

extrackt,engage,enthrall,rage,scrot,alarm,bling,cpu,deskshow,emu,flame,forecasts,language,mail,

mem,mixer,moon,net,news,photo,rain,screenshot,slideshow,screenshot,snow,taskbar,tclock,uptime,

weather,winselector,wlan,mixer

You can always install packages later. Once the installation has completed, you need to add the path to your opt/environment file.

sudo [insert your favourite text editor here e.g. gedit] -w /etc/environment

Append the following to the PATH line:

PATH="(whatever was here before):/opt/e17/bin"

Mine looks like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/ bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/opt/e17/bin"

Save and exit. With the skip script above, Entrance, the default login manager for E17 has been left out as it can sometimes cause problems according to several threads. As such your existing login manager will be used. A guide how to install Entrance with E17 can be found here and basically involves removing entrance from the --skip.

We now need to add an entry for Enlightenment so that it is can be loaded after login.

sudo [insert your favorite text editor here e.g. gedit] /usr/share/xsessions/enlightenment.desktop

And add the following:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Enlightenment

Comment=Enlightenment Window Manager - www.enlightenment.org

Type=XSession

Exec=/usr/bin/enlightenment_start

TryExec=/usr/bin/enlightenment

Please note the _start in bold. This is important and not on any of the forums link to from this article. If you do not add this then Enlightenment will not start properly. It crashed on loading and recovering via F1 didnt fix the problem so appending this will save you some headaches.

That will give you a fairly minimal E17 to customise. You will however want to change from the default theme fairly quickly and Get-E.org is a great source for themes. As a side note, if you want to update E17, use the following command :

sudo ./easy_e17.sh -u

Enlightenment also supports animated backgrounds, however I have not tested this feature and all the example videos I have seen show it to be horribly stuttery.

For more information or support I would encourage you to visit the following places : old & updated ubuntu installation guide, Enlightenment page.

As a whole, I rather like E17 but I have not had enough time to really play with it. When I have I will post some more on the subject.

At the risk of annoying all the blog syndicators I ping to when I update (ok... 2) I just had to write a brief post about the Crysis demo. It is simply stunning, but you already knew that. What is more impressive is that a user called LennyRhys found a very simple modification which allows most of the Dx10 effects on Dx9 Hardware or in Dx9 mode.

[quote from original thread]

I'm one of the few VERY happy people in the crysis community at the moment. I ran the game with everything high at 1680x1050 and it looks awesome, very playable, no lag.

C2D E6750

Gigabyte P35 DS4

2GB OCZ Platinum 800MHz

Nvidia GF 8800GTX

All at stock

If you tweak the configuration files in \CVarGroups\ by copying and pasting the "very high" settings (1st paragraph) IN PLACE of the "high" settings (last paragraph) the game will load the highest possible settings even though the drop-down menus display "high.". The difference between "high" settings and the tweaked settings is immense: shadows are deeper, more realistic; the leaves have better reflective properties, better textures; the colours are better; and the level of detail is simply stunning.

[/quote]

The whole thing is reminiscent of the CellFactor: Revolution mod. According to the developer, the game would only run with a AEGIA PhysX card. A modification was quickly found which allowed it to be played in software with most of the 'snazzy' new features. Here are a selection of images from the thread, as you can see, this minor modification makes the game look even more stunning...

 

In my usual excellent timing, the website hosting the programs I have written about below (http://www.rarewitchproject.com/), has just gone down. They are presently working on a site wide redesign. Will update when site comes back up. Sorry about this

Update 2: The site is now back up. Enjoy the redesigned goodness - http://www.rarewitchproject.com

Following on from the post a few days back - I have found a number of programs that help customise goldeneye. Not only can new single player levels be made and played (in emulator OR console) but all the levels have been unlocked and can be played in multiplayer.

The first utility has been out for a little while now - Goldeneye Full Face Mapper.

This program allows you to replace any texture in Goldeneye - from the wall / decals to smoke and even faces. This is a feature that RARE had completed and intended to be released with Perfect Dark but didnt due to legal concerns. Now, with a little tweaking you can change all the faces of the built in bad guys in Goldeneye.

Update: SubDragon from Rarewitch project emailed to let me know that this tool is no longer required as the goldeneye setup editor v2.1 can do this as well. Its still useful for a quick and dirty tweak however.

The second program is the most impressive - it is called the Goldeneye Setup Editor.

This is the second version of this program. The first was released in 2005 but everything had to be done manually in hex codes and as a result I didnt get anywhere with this. The new version allows for visual editing of levels and object placement and is highly recommended. It allows anything to be changed, from the missions to the placement of enemies / objects. Several user created levels are already available and range from retweaked original levels to completely new maps.

Example of Goldeneye multiplayer using G5 building from Perfect Dark

A video of a new single player level : Library

Example of a retweaked Runway level:

I was randomly looking for a quote from Goldeneye (the movie) on youtube last night when I discovered a collection of videos showing the various fun things you can do with a bit of gamesharking. The kind of things you can do are really impressive, for example, the first few preview pictures show dual wielding of weapons but with the actor camera angle / height changed. Whilst this looks excellent with dual magnums, two RPC90s or KF7s look a little weird. Did someone say gigantism? From guards that don't fit in the dam level to enormous remote mines.

One of the more fun alterations was changing the default actor model from the standard Russian guard to Natalia or the scientist models. Still more entertaining was Sean Bean replaced by a Goldeneye satellite which walked around the end of the facility level. There appeared to be several codes which just made the default soldiers go crazy, from shooting at right angles to the player to shooting at the idiot with the box on his head. The final six pictures showed multiplayer fun from levels which definitely were not included as official multiplayer maps (train, dam, cradle and depot.)

I discovered a glitch that could be exploited on the facility level many years ago. I never posted it online as I though everyone else knew about it, but recently I discovered no mention of it anywhere on the official Goldeneye fan sites. It is simple enough to do. When at the end of Facility, talk to Alec but get close to the door. Immediately when the alarm sounds, run through the door into the lab area. Ourmov WILL NOT spawn, meaning you can return to the bottling room and shoot at guards to your hearts content. Alec will even help you.  I will post a video guide to this (although its trivial to perform) soon.

Gameshark Videos:

Part 1,2,3,4,5,6,7