Does this rock or what! Check out my screenshot and look at the lovely game of FreeSpace 2, playing in Linux, after just being compiled by yours truly. Major thanks fly out to the guys porting fs2 to Linux and Volition for releasing the source code. This is one of my favourite games, and a port to Linux will rock! It seems to work well, although I can only run it in a window at the moment so it is a little slow. But still, I’m excited!
In a shock development, I am not trying out the development (read: gtk2) version of Galeon, the Gnome Gecko-based browser. Of course, the rendering engine is virtually flawless, however, I remember using the stable flavour a while back and finding the interface rather lacking. Not having the two side-by-side I can’t exactly pinpoint the reason for this. I would expect anti-aliased fonts have something to do with it. Also I think the devs must have changed the way the tabs work, as I remember them annoying me in the way that they worked last time, but now they seem fine. They are much more similiar in workings to the Opera tabs, which of course endears me towards them.
Before I begin, let me point you towards Back to Iraq. It’s all about one journalist’s findings in Northern Iraq. He should have just entered Iraq at the time I’m posting this. It’s one of the more interesting so called ‘War Blogs’ out there.
Also I read on The Register today that the Mozilla project is going to be focusing on making small applications rather than the monolithic suite that is in existance today. One thing that makes me pleased is that they seem to have decided to focus on Phoenix (or what it’s name becomes!) as the browser component. I like Phoenix alot from the earlier builds, so if they continue to work on that then I may well split from Opera and go back to Phoenix. Also that’ll make my Linux install fully Open Source I think. Hmm, aside from the modem and nVidia drivers, but they don’t have any Open Source equivalent, so that cannot be helped.
Some of you may know that I prefer Gnome to KDE and especially GTK to Qt. I like minimalism in my desktop. I actually run Blackbox rather than either KDE or Gnome so the GTK/Qt issue is more interesting than the general DE one. I love the clean look of the gtk default icons compared to the Qt version, especially the stock Gtk2 icons vs. KDE crystal for example.
An application I use quite alot is OpenOffice. The general interface to Oo isn’t the best I’ve seen. It gets the job done, but not in the nicest or neatest way and doesn’t tend to be an example of a ’transparent’ interface. So it made me quite excited to see that Ximian is contributing to the OpenOffice project to iron out some of the UI issues. Now, this is good for me as they are porting the gui to Gtk. This may displease the Qt lovers in this world, but it makes me very happy. OpenOffice is the only application (aside from Opera, which uses Qt but is such a good browser I can overlook it!) that I use that isn’t Gtk (aside from text editors), which sometimes is a distraction when working with apps. Also, the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines would make OpenOffice more usable in a stroke if they were applied consistently across the program.
From the slide show available at the Ximian site, it looks like much progress has been made in regard to the UI aswell as the underlying integration with the rest of the Ximian suite, which I would guess is a major aim for them.
I hope OpenOffice accepts the Ximian changes into the main build process, or that Ximian make available their own flavour of OpenOffice, as that would make my desktop even more kawaii*!
Further to the previous post, I just installed the OpenOffice 1.1beta release. From first impressions, though not on the scale of Ximian’s vision, the UI is nicer, and the options seem to be more logically organised.
A tip I’d give is to use Font Replacement in the options dialog. Replace Andale Sans UI with whatever font you want OO to use as its interface font. I chose Arial, but you may choose whatever takes your fancy =)