The Web Invaded the Desktop

I can officially say that the web has infiltrated itself into my desktop operating system. On my dock, eight out of the fourteen applications are directly web-related: Safari, my web browser; Mail, my mail client; Adium, my messaging client; Colloquy, my IRC client; Hulu Desktop, a desktop version of the online TV website; iTunes, especially in regards to the iTunes store; Songbird, for finding music online; and Times, for viewing news online.

Slowing Down

Due to other things that have come up, I haven’t been able to write too many blog posts recently. To any followers, I apologize. I will try to set some time apart to write something else soon.

Keynote Thumbnails in Quick Look

As can be seen from Apple’s Leopard presentations before release, as well as on page 22 of the Leopard manual, opening a Keynote presentation using Quick Look should allow you to see slide thumbnails on the side, as in 0:28 in this video. However, this is not set as the default behavior. Achieving this is very simple, though. In Keynote’s preferences, under General, simply check off “Include preview in document by default.” There you have it!

via Apple’s Support page

Snow Leopard is Darker

It seems that my predictions, which were one of the first on the internet regarding the subject, that Snow Leopard would be darker have come true! Here’s a quick timeline of how I came about the idea and all the steps that Apple took to make it glaringly obvious that Snow Leopard’s UI would be even the slightest bit darker than Leopard’s:

1. Someone on IRC (nick JHKKHJK or similar, I can’t quite recall it)  in a WWDC discussion channel told me that Snow Leopard’s UI would be darker. That started originally what seemed like a wild goose chase, but ended up being a lot more meaningful than that.
2. First up was MobileMe, which sported a dark toolbar. Knowing how Apple feels about design and a look of integration across all its products, I found it obvious that it was only a matter of time before other applications started going dark as well.
3. Next, interfaces began to merge with iTunes 8, which  in Grid View has a dark “sub-toolbar” and even darker scrollbars.
4. When QuickTime X’s new interface was announced I was sure that my ideas were no longer simply speculation and that Apple was giving way too many clus that they were going to give us a darker interfaces.
5. Now, Dock context menus are dark. Having five interface items be dark is interesting enough; I wonder what else will be darker in future Snow Leopard releases. Besides, all the iLife apps have dark scrollbars.

Oh, and there are new wallpapers available for Snow Leopard; I’m already using some of them.

What Happened to Project Looking Glass?

Project Looking Glass is a cross-platform (compatible with many Unix-based operating systems) three-dimensional desktop environment based on Java technology made by Sun Microsystems. The technology started with the vision of recreating the way the desktop environment works, taking it from the plain 2D and 2.5D we are used to to something rather different.

The project originally went beyond a simple conception into a full-fledged stable desktop environment. Its last stable release (1.0.1), however, was in 2007. Its development seems to have virtually stopped, though. It’s plainly obvious, especially since its website hasn’t been updated in two years or so and we hardly hear anything about it. So what ever happened to Project Looking Glass? Why did the project stagnate?

After giving it some thought and research, here are a few reasons I came up with:

• There is a lack of user base. Sure, it’s interesting, but not many people felt the compulsion to switch from their two-dimensional desktop environment, one to which they had gotten completely accustomed, to something completely new. Besides, how many common users besides “techies” have heard of Looking Glass at all?
• There is a lack of interest. This builds up on the previous point. It seems Sun simply got tired of the project and promoting it. Besides, Sun has already accepted GNOME as the de facto standard desktop environment for its OS releases, such as OpenSolaris.
• It’s another platform. Modern developers, despite being relatively welcoming to new technologies, seem to have already found their niche and divided themselves into what they find suitable. Further more, Looking Glass and its APIs, as far as it seems, has a lot unique features that are not easily or readily deployable to other platforms, so it’s not a WORA (write-once-run-anywhere) situation.

Given these, and other reasons, such as the easier availability of other 3D desktop environments, such as Compiz, it’s relatively easy to see why Looking Glass died out. The project’s latency is still a loss for the world of development.

Project Euler 5 by Exhaustion in Python

Here is my solution to the 5th problem of Project Euler, solved via exhaustion in Python. Please note that I am aware that this problem is more preferably solved by factoring, but programatic exhaustion can be “fun.” With a few added print statements, a file around 3 GB large could be outputted from this 4 kilobyte program.

This program is Python 3-compatible. To make it compatible with earlier versions, remove the parentheses from the final print statement. It is released under the CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license).

5. What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20?

divisors = range(1, 21)
i = 1

while i:
\t for x in divisors:
\t\t if i % x != 0:
\t\t\t break

\t if i % x == 0 and x == 20:
\t\t answer = i
\t\t i = -1

\t i = i + 1

print(answer)

Opera 10 Beta Review

I bet Opera has recently been getting a lot of attention after this article was put on Digg, and while I myself have already tried out Opera, I decided to take another look at it and to see all the good things Opera 10 Beta has to offer. There are a lot cool new features, such graphical tabs (including a Windows Vista-like preview where hovering over a tab let’s you see a preview of the page), 100% on the Acid3 test (although I still find it doesn’t render some pages as well as Safari or Firefox), and better speed, but I’m going to take a look at some of the sidebar features: what I would consider to be separate applications built into the browser.

Before starting, though, I’d just like to mention what’s one of very few cons with this (pre-)release: a few preferences are scattered around other menus when they really should be in Opera > Preferences, namely Appearance and Mail and Chat Accounts.

I’ve never really liked built-in support for e-mail and chat, but Opera implemented it well. When I open up mail in the sidebar, the current page being viewed is still intact. From this sidebar, I can check if I have any new mail. If I do, I can open it in another tab. Once I’m done, I just close the tab and am back to browsing. No more switching between applications. Now, while I’m still a big Colloquy fan, I find that IRC chatting has been implemented quite well. Your favorite (or rather, recently-connected) rooms are listed in the sidebar and all you need is one click to connect to them.

For jotting down links you want to go back to later but don’t exactly want to bookmark, the notes tab on the side allows you to jot those down, as well as other notes or reminders. There’s also a built-in address book, which makes keeping contacts less cumbersome than it tends to be on Windows and Linux distros (I still prefer OS X’s Address Book.app, though).

Overall, Opera 10 Beta a very nice and stable release whose final build I would certainly recommend, especially to Windows and Linux users. Don’t get me wrong; it runs very well on OS X, and is about sixty megabytes smaller than Safari, but I just find that user interface doesn’t fit in very well with the rest of the system. Other than that, it’s great and the features are wonderful.

“My” Snow Leopard Feature

While I doubt that I was the only one to recommend this, one of my submissions to Apple (see “Spotlight and the Finder“) seems to have been heard.

If I’m in my Documents folder and I start typing in the Spotlight toolbar item, I’ll want Spotlight to start searching within my Documents folder, not throughout my whole Mac. If I want to do that, I’ll either go into the root directory or search from the menu bar.

The following screenshot is taken from a now-removed YouTube video depicting Snow Leopard’s Finder preferences:

Thanks for the new feature, Apple!

Reflections on GNOME’s Sociological Research

I took a look at GNOME’s recent sociological research, which set out to organize information about worldwide GNOME users and to get some ideas about who uses GNOME, what they use it for, and so on.

To start off, I found the relations between countries and languages to be extremely interesting. From a developer’s point a view, this is great for knowing which language localizations should be more of a priority than others, what languages the project development or support team should have a basic hang of, and of the general future of the GNOME-using community. The number of Chinese users is almost the same as the number of American and European users combined.

It’s also easy to see that the GNOME community is being led by students and learners worldwide that want to know more, distribute more information, and have access to more information. The vast majority of users are currently attending a university or college, wish to learn more, and use GNOME not only as a work environment, but also for pleasure. This shows that it’s nice that GNOME is succeeding at reaching out to both sides of the spectrum.

Most of the users are connected to the internet, mostly with high-speed DSL or better. A lot use Windows as well and, by a small margin, tend to prefer desktop computers to laptops for working with GNOME and Linux. Many however, answered they’d like GNOME to follow in some of the steps of OS X: most notably, they want to be able to search for menu items within each program.

The GNOME team itself summarized a few important points, such as (just to name a few): more “professional” applications need to be written for the Linux desktop, GNOME should head for the cloud (integrating internet activities more prominently into the daily use of the desktop), the panels should be redesigned, and finding things (be it files, applications, etc) needs to be easier.

I hope GNOME 3.0 turns out to be an awesome release when it comes by, and that all the information gathered can be put into good use.

Learning Lisp

I’m about to venture off into the world of I consider to be less explored languages, and ones that I find have a great potential to be famous programming languages. I plan on learning Prolog, LISP, OCaml, and perhaps Eiffel.

I became interested in these languages when I read about a few of them on a post entitled “A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” that was on the Reddit front page today. I took my first step with SICP, which gave me a broader idea of what Scheme/LISP looked like, and now I’m planning on following Practical Common Lisp (link, as well as to other useful online programming books, can also be found on my sidebar).

Wish me luck on my new adventure!