A popular indie record label? Selling their tracks online at very decent prices, you say? Discounts when you buy full albums? Warp Records have a pretty cool online music store with proper, non-digital-rights-managed mp3s of most if not all of their collection. The rest of the record industry, take note.
They want to steal my money and I’ll be damned if they can’t have some of it with my blessing.
Maybe this Rob Love desktop integration lark is progressing faster that I thought. Latest news is that gnome-volume-manager is checked into the Gnome CVS repository. This little baby handles things like auto-mounting removable media, such as CDs and Compact Flash cards, when you insert them rather than this task having to be carried out manually. It also holds support for autorun of programs upon inserting of the media.
Whilst I’m not a particular autorun-fan, it’s things like this that will make general Linux usage easier for the masses. The ones that couldn’t care less that the reason they cannot use their new digital camera is because they have to mount it first. Gnome-volume-manager will mount it for you, copy the files to a folder and pop-up a Nautilus window with your new photos in. Which is an autorun feature I would use.
I read a post at Whitespace today. It’s about why Scrivs uses web standards and cares about things such as Information Architecture and accessibility when designing websites; whilst most of the web designing population still knock up any old rubbish in Dreamweaver or Frontpage. For each argument for standards, he could put up another against. Seems like there is some kind of balance here? I don’t think so.
With many things, there is an easy, hackish way to do a job that just gets it done. Not perfectly, but in a way that looks okay. If you are willing to take more time to learn the proper technique, your finished item will be better in some way; perhaps more robust, more beautiful or just more rewarding. I believe that web design is at this level.
Recently, there has been much debate over the Gnome file-selector dialog box. At the moment it looks rather old fashioned, even if it is intuitive and easy to use it lacks some of the recent UI improvements that have surfaced recently (such as the shortcuts-bar that appears on the left-hand side of many open/save dialog boxes now-a-days).
A few mock-up screen-shots of ideas for the new file-selector can be found here, here and here. Out of all the ideas I’ve seen, I like the design found in this item at OSNews. The accompanying explanation does a good job of explaining why the dialog is laid out is a somewhat unconventional manner. I agree with most of the arguments put forward and I especially like the ‘pathfinder’ widget used.
I released new version of dWall, v1.3, with the following new features:
You can get your own copy from the dWall page. I think there a bug may have crept in whereby stretching sometimes stretches wrong wallpaper. If anyone spots this, could they get in contact so I can try and fix it? Thanks =)
