Posted by Skrud at Friday, March 10th 2006 at 11:02am
I found something really awesome on Lifehacker today. It’s called eyeOS and it’s a web-based operating system. That’s right, an entire operating system that runs in a web browser on a hosted server. There’s built-in rich text editing, contact manager, calendar… even web-browser! eyeOS is also free (as in freedom), and it incorporates some of the coolest use of AJAX that I’ve seen.
Go check it out for yourself on eyeOS.info, which is a free hosting service for eyeOS (and also has the coolest web-based registration I’ve ever seen. It’s worth registering just for that).
Tags: apps, geek, tech | 3 comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, January 13th 2006 at 9:00am
Throughout the conference, Microsoft set up a number of PCs outside the main ballroom so that delegates can check their emails, surf the web, kill time or whatever. The cool thing about these PCs though is that they’re running a beta build of Windows Vista. So we get to play around with whatever Microsoft has been cooking up over the last 6 years or so.
Last night, they even had a presentation in order to show off the new features of Windows Vista and how it differs from previous versions of Windows. The upsetting thing about this presentation is that there are very few features of Windows Vista that I think can be called “new”. Anthony Vranic is an excellent speaker and knows how to keep a crowd interested - but when he said that “Internet Explorer now has a brand new feature and that’s Tabbed Browsing” the audience erupted in laughter.
The point isn’t that there’s nothing very original in Windows Vista. It’s not about who came up with what first. The ideas are out there, and people will use them. However it looks to me like Windows Vista is nothing more than Microsoft desperately trying to catch up to Mac OS X and even Linux. It’s almost similar to how OpenOffice.org is always trying to catch up to Microsoft Office. Windows Vista really just addresses these features that have been missing from Windows while Mac OS X has had them for the past 5 years at least. For example: window compositing is delegated to the GPU, built-in parental controls let you customize which apps certain users can run, there’s a “new” Alt-Tab feature that lays out all the windows on the screen so you can cycle through them, you can search for apps and files on your desktop, there are widgets that float around in this “sidebar”… You can navigate your file system based on metadata, you can tag edit and play with photos…
There is nothing in Windows Vista that makes it even marginally more interesting than Mac OS X Tiger, and it’s not even slated to be released until around the end of this year - Tiger came out last April. With their near infinite budget and depth of talent, Microsoft is surely capable of not only catching up to their competition but pushing the boundaries of operating systems. They have the resources to develop something completely new, and possibly even better, than where the rest of computing is right now. If companies like Apple and even open source projects like Linux can implement all the features you see in Windows Vista on much smaller budgets, Microsoft should be able to actually innovate instead of just follow along.
For the sake of hilarity, there are a sequences of videos, Re-introducing the Real Windows Vista, that actually use the audio from a Windows Vista presentation synced to a demonstration of Mac OS X Tiger. It’s pretty damn funny.
Tags: apps, cutc, events, geek, mac, tech | 3 comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, January 13th 2006 at 8:35am
CUTC is finally underway. We left ridiculously early in the morning with Guillaume picked up Eric, Matt and myself. We finally arrived at the Sheraton Parkway North around 12:30pm, signed into the conference and attended a keynote by Hannah Cho on Computer culture and society. It was okay.
Following that was a seminar by Mike Shaver, one of the founding members of the Mozilla Foundation. He offered some insight into the current technology and renewed interest in web browsers. Firefox now has approximately 10% of the web surfing population, which is a pretty significant portion. In order to maintain and attract that 10% of the market, companies need to make sure that their web sites work with Firefox, which most companies seem to think is worth doing.
The Mozilla Foundation’s charter states that it exists “to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet”. To this effect, a Firefox browser monopoly isn’t favoured over and IE monopoly. But having enough market share to be able to start pulling their weight around the internet for the purpose of promoting standards, and compatibility is a great thing.
Mozila’s influence led to improvements to Internet Explorer as well - think of tabbed browsing and RSS feed tracking - and it’s shipping earlier than planned as well. Mike said that even though those aren’t Mozilla products, the Mozilla project did contribute to improving the user experience of those people using Internet Explorer by coercing IE to adopt some of its superior features.
Tags: apps, cutc, events, geek, tech | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, November 23rd 2005 at 1:57am
I’ve settled for xoblite as my shell replacement. It’s a derivative of Blackbox for Windows, and Blackbox is one of the most amazing, lightweight windowing managers for Linux. Toss in some XP Visual Styles and Wallpapers from deviantart and some Konfabulator goodness, and I have a beautiful Windows Desktop.
(Yes, that _is_ vim).
Tags: apps, geek, tech | 9 comments
Posted by Skrud at Monday, November 21st 2005 at 9:14pm
My Windows partition had reached its six-month limit a while ago, so I figured it was time for a reformat. I also happen to be insane; I think it’s a lot of fun to go around downloading, installing and updating software. So I get a kick out of reformatting. I like reformatting whenever I have midterms coming up, because it’s a great distraction and I can pretend that it’s important. Whenever I do this, I like to see how long I can last without “paying” for software. There are a lot of cool tools out there, and here’s what I’ve found this time around:
ClamWin: Open source antivirus program based on ClamAV, the popular Unix Anti-Virus app. Since it uses ClamAV and it’s database, it’s pretty well updated and secure. (ClamAV is what often gets used on Unix based e-mail servers to scan incoming mail for Windows client machines, for example). Hopefully it’ll prove itself to be better than AVG or Avast! (both of which really annoy me, I think it’s the interfaces).
7zip: An open source archive program. I tried this out about a year ago and it was so frustrating to use that I ditched it for WinRAR. But it seems to have improved a good deal and the contextual menu-based interface has so far worked pretty well.
FileZilla: I’ve been using this one for a long time. It’s by far my favourite FTP client, and it supports SFTP over SSH to boot. It easily surpasses all the commercial FTP clients I’ve used to date. Simple, clean, no bulk, and powerful. Excellent stuff.
Sygate Personal Firewall is a free personal firewall app. It’s much simpler and lighter than ZoneAlarm, and just as effective.
Konfabulator is the predecessor to Apple’s Dashboard. Same thing: widgets, widgets and more widgets. Pretty little clocks and weather applets to make your desktop much nicer.
Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative to avoid installation of bulky, obnoxious media players with loads of ads attached to them.
Media Player Classic is an open source video player based on the old Windows Media Player. It’s extremely simple. No bulk or frills or loud flashy things. It’ll play anything and everything you have a codec for. (I usually install the Gordian Knot Codec Pack for codecs, which has everything).
OpenOffice.org 2.0. I hate OpenOffice.org. But I’m willing to give 2.0 a shot. We’ll see how long I can last.
CDBurner XP Pro: Freeware CD/DVD burning app. We’ll see if it can taket the place of my beloved Nero (a whopping $80 US just for the downloadable version).
Y’z Shadow: I’ve had this forever, too. Y’z Shadow is a simple app that just adds a drop shadow to every window for added slickness. It’s also enables menu transparencies in Windows 2k/XP
foobar2000: My longtime music player of choice, foobar can and does play anything. Loads of plugins are available, too. It’s great for huge music collections thanks to it’s database and sorting features.
Google Desktop 2: When did this happen? Version 2?!! Anyway, this effort from Google packs a wallop. It’s a neat little app. In addition to the standard little search bar that lets you search the web as well as all the documents on your PC, there’s a sidebar that sits on top of other windows (or gets hidden off the side). The sidebar contains numerous little applets such as showing you your latest GMails, an RSS aggregator, a Google News feed, a Scratch Pad to type random little notes in, a todo list, a picture applet that will show random pictures from your hard drive or customizable web feeds, a map applet for random Google maps…. It’s incredible. There’s a bunch of plugins available, too, and you can write your own if you want. It will also give you notifications/reminders whenever there’s a new news item, or a new article in one of your tracked feeds. What really impressed was the fact that it will listen in on your web browser and automatically add RSS feeds for sites you visit (an easily disabled feature, but still pretty cool). I know this thing is going to provide me with hours of fun before I reboot back into my Linux partition. Unfortunately, it seems to make some parts of Konfabulator redundant, although I think Konfabulator is far prettier.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express: This was one of the main topics of the aforementioned Microsoft Student Outreach Webcast. The Express versions of Visual Studio are a series of IDEs targeted at hobbyist programmers and students. There’s a lot less bulk than in the larger versions of Visual Studio, since it’s split up into a few different applications such as Visual C++ Express, Visual C# Express, etc. Since I’ve started working on assignments for Concordia’s Networking class - which requires use of Windows Sockets - in my (limited) free time, for fun, so that by the time I take the class I’ll already know everything, I’ll get to experiment with these for a bit. They’re also “free for one year,” which seems stupid; they should be free all the time which is stupidly worded, they are free as long as you download them within the next year. (Updated, see comment). But I still think they should be free all the time.
Now I’m fishing around for some skinning/theming/shell customization for Windows. I don’t think LiteStep has been updated in two years. But I’ll probably just end up settling for some Visual Styles skins.
Tags: apps, tech | 5 comments
