hello!

Seth Nickell, on Gnome 3. This and this (among many other reasons) is why I truly believe it’s such an exciting time to be a Linux user today.

I’ve had Docky installed for a couple of months now. Sure, a dock à-la mac at the bottom of the screen looks pretty. I mean really pretty:

Yes, it gets noticed all right. Especially with those weather updates. However, there were just too many inconveniences I had to put up with just for a pretty dock. Eventually, it just wasn’t worth it. A dock (like Docky) in its current state just does not fit in my workflow.

I’m not sure how different the dock in OS X is vis-à-vis Docky. I have also tried AWN, but I found it inferior to Docky. So anyway, for the purposes of this post, I’ll just use Docky as an example.

More clicks to do the same thing

The dock works great as a launcher. However, when it comes to window management, the limitations start to show. If I have 2 or more windows of the same app open, I need an extra click to get to what I want.

One click to see the list, and the other to select what I need.

Lack of information

It gets worse when a particular window needs your attention, and that happens frequently in IM apps. The app icon in the dock bounces but it’s not immediately evident which window needs your attention.

Turns out you again need an additional click to find out.

I don’t like scrubbing

So you autohide the dock. I don’t want it floating over my apps. That’s well and good. But when the dock comes back up, I have to go through the length of the dock (possibly to get the labels to appear) and find what I need. With the panel, you know where to go and you just do.

Similar icons

This may not be Docky’s fault, but if I have to documents open in OpenOffice Writer, both icons are the same in the dock. There is no way to distinguish one from the other. I need to hover the mouse to get an idea of what that icon represents and again, that is additional work I don’t really want to do.

I’ve been thinking how to present more information to the user to find things faster in the dock, while maintaining its ease of use and simplicity. And it still needs to look cool I suppose. I’ll try to post some ideas once I get more time to think through them.

What’s your take on docks? How different is the Mac OS X dock from the variants on linux and windows? I’d love to hear any feedback on this.

I just installed Fedora 11 on my work machine a couple of weeks ago (together with the necessary software for work) on my thinkpad, and I’m very impressed with the OS. This is the first time I’m using Fedora on a daily basis to get work done. Until now, it’s usually just been trying out the live CD, but nothing more.

Fedora makes Ubuntu look positively dated in a few ways. The implementation of Pulseaudio is great (although this breaks apps that rely on OSS), Plymouth makes boot look very pretty, and virtualization support is way better. Also, I never thought I’d say this but *gasp* I quite prefer PackageKit over Synaptic.

I’m still discovering new things as I use it everyday. The issues I’ve had are usually because Fedora has moved on to something better, and the apps are yet to catch up. Which brings me to the point that the only problem is Fedora might just be a tad *too* bleeding edge to be recommended for people new to linux and/or who are not willing to spend some time on google if they encounter issues. Ubuntu is more straightforward, and is therefore still more suited for people trying Linux for the first time. Regardless, when everything is ironed out, Fedora is a joy to use. I’ll probably get it on my home machine as well when Fedora 12 rolls around.

This has to be a new low.

This looks very promising. They seem to have put a lot of thought into the interface.

Linus Torvalds

Being an IBMer for nearly a year now, it’s quite an interesting read from my perspective. And it reminds me of some of the things I enjoy in this organization.

Gnome announces plans for 3.0. Two main (user-visible) features are the Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist. The former is a new way to interact with the desktop, and the latter is a change in the way we access files.

It’s best to see Gnome Shell in action to understand how it works. Zeitgeist on the other hand is easier to explain. The idea is to let you find the documents you want without having to browse through the hard disk filesystem. You can find files by name, comments, tags, timeline among other filters.

The great news though is that GNOME Shell and Zeitgeist have both have been in development for a while now and have working code available. While some these changes represent big changes in the way users interact with the desktop, the plans also seem to fit within the Gnome ideology of evolutionary updates.

I started using Firefox when Opera was acting up on my Ubuntu machine at home. I was quick to fault Opera for all the problems I had on that machine. But as it turns out, that probably had more to do with Ubuntu than Opera. I decided to set up another browser on my work RHEL based machine, and since Google Chrome isn’t officially available yet and I wanted something quick and stable, I selected Opera. And wow, it flies and works like a charm there.

So it’s back (at least partly) to Opera now. I’m not sure what the problems were on Ubuntu. Besides, since I started using RHEL, Ubuntu just looks increasingly unreliable and slow. Let’s see if things change when Jaunty is released next month. Otherwise, I’m seriously considering switching to another distro at home. Any recommendations? Let me know.

It’s been a year since I’ve completely wiped windows from my laptop. But now I can’t get my iPhone to sync properly.

Virtualbox has some issues and the developers are tardy to resolve them. I understand some people have managed to get the phone working under VMware. I haven’t tried that route yet.

Otherwise, looks like I’ll have to settle with dual-booting. So, here’s a big fat ‘meh’.