1. Nov 9th, 2006

    Rounded Corners – 59

    How tolerant is your code? Bill de hÓra tackles malformed HTML, and ends up with a few insights: “Engineers have a concept called tolerence. A tolerance specifies the variance in dimensions under which which a part or component can be built and still be acceptable for production use. … There is a diminishing returns curve for manufacturing cost along how tight you make a tolerance. Engineers (real ones, not programmers) use tolerances to actively mange cost and risk.”

    nVidia goes AIGLX. nVidia just released a new Linux driver that supports AIGLX. The official release (read: changelog) doesn’t sound like much, they just added a method to their API. But it should cure the nVidia/i945 compatibility problem that frustrated me to no end last week.

    What we’re really talking about here is Beryl, and getting it to work with just about any PC sold today. It’s an amazing piece of everyday UI productivity for Linux users, that’s going mainstream just as Vista is going RTM. If you used OS/X or Vista, you know what I’m talking about. Expose, cube desktops, zoom, transparency, drop shadow and a few eye candy features that make the desktop so much more useful.

    Unlike OS/X it’s a bit flakey, still an early (0.1.1) release with some broken parts (TrailFocus will eat up all your CPU, be warned). Also unlike OS/X and Vista, Beryl is based on plugins so expect to see features coming up quicker than Jobs/Gates can demo their future plans.

    Strike that. Vista just went RTM. Time to reconsider everything I just said.

    Or not.

    Then there’s the Mac. Ben Bederson shares the same frustration I have with the Mac — visually appealing, but utterly inefficient: “The essential problem is that using OS X is slow, slow, slow. It seems as if Apple has never heard of Fitts’ Law – the essential human performance concept that it takes longer to move the mouse farther, or to click on small things.”

    Uphill both ways. If you think you have it tought, check out these four programmers.

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    1. Nov 9th, 2006

      Paul Brown

      On the Mac, you really need to get QuickSilver to avoid the tyrany of the mouse on MacOS. Properly set up, it gives you complete control (even for menu items without shortcuts) of the apps and your workspace, and it has a number of pleasing properties, e.g., being keyword/match-driven (“pla” bring up the AppleScript that tells iTunes to play) instead of menunomic-based (ALT-foo).

    2. Nov 9th, 2006

      Assaf

      QuickSilver is the one thing I miss about the Mac, it’s one of the best UI inventions.

      But it’s still a lousy way to get around the inefficient Mac UI. Say I want to change the style of the selected text. There’s a quick shortcut for it, I don’t recall what it is, because I use so many apps that treat it differently.

      But with one glance I can pick the menu, Alt into it, pick the option and be done. That works equally well on Linux and Windows.

      On the Mac, it’s either mousing, painful use of F2, or a lot of QuickSilver key clicks to get to the right place.

    3. Nov 9th, 2006

      links for 2006-11-10 — Chip’s Quips

      [...] Indefinite Articles » The Four Programmers It’s all true! I was there! Only I had it much worse… Thanks, assaf. (tags: humor programming) [...]

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