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journal: think
28 Days of Linux - Week of Feb. 12
Sunday, February 12
I tried again (in vain) to install the fglrx drivers, and that’s about it.
Monday, February 13
I found a bug. When creating a drawer for the workspace switcher, if you make the workspace switcher bigger than 73 pixels and place it second to the right on the bottom panel, you will experience a lock up should you try to open the drawer.
Tuesday, February 14
Might as well just say this: there’s something about Firefox that bugs me, more specifically, this is a problem with Gecko. For some reason, Gecko will not draw the standard GTK+ widgets in a web page. Comparison:
Gecko Widgets
GTK+ Widgets
The biggest offender is the drop-down box, which loses both its looks and functionality (the GTK+ dropdowns work like the ones in OS X):
Gecko Dropdown
GTK+ Dropdown
Hopefully the problem is rectified in the near future, but I see it happening when Firefox decides to actually follow the HIGs of the platforms it runs on (and not one for all platforms), meaning never.
Wednesday, February 15th
Yesterday I ranted, so today I’ll tell you about something done right. In fact, it’s done better than the same feature in either Mac OS or Windows. It’s called KSnapshot, and it gives a user interface to taking screenshots. KSnapshot isn’t included with GNOME, but can be downloaded quite easily. It allows taking shots of the desktop, a window, or a selection of the screen. It also allows you to save the shot anywhere you want, in your choice of file formats. No more taking the screenshot, then opening up the image editor to convert it. It’s a feature that I hope Microsoft takes note of, because it is infinitely more useful than what Windows has today.
Thursday, February 16th
Nothing interesting to report today. I tried to make heads or tails of how to use Ruby in Ubuntu, but to no avail. If anyone can point me to a good guide, please do.
Friday, February 17th
Today I started adding some more feeds to Liferea and some tasks to Evolution. I’ll try to remember to put my homework assignments in the task list, but no guarantees.
Please note: There will be no entries for Saturday the 18th and Sunday the 19th because I will be in Flagstaff on those dates.
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3 | 945 |
| Liam | comments | views |
thinkback
For me, it’s not really the fact that they are custom, as long as they are used sparingly (IE 7 is tolerable for me). What I can’t stand is when the widgets are ugly and outdated looking, like the ones in Gecko, or Windows Classic widgets in XP (Office 97 is bad in this respect.)
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| Feb. 20, 2006 | |
| Liam | 5:36 pm |
1.
I hate it when applications don’t use the current OS’s standard interface widgets. As an example, right now I’m using my mom’s computer with Netscape 7.0.1 because my apartment does not yet have reliable Internet access.
Netscape’s UI is horrible. There is very little about it that is standard, and almost nothing taken out of the Mac OS’s Toolbox. Menus act like they do in Windows, buttons look squarish like in Windows, and so on. Plus, since they are custom-coded, they don’t do a lot of stuff that would make sense, like sensible keyboard navigation. And to top it off, trying to enter this comment into the box is very slow, and entire paragraphs show up on one line instead of wrapping to the width of the comment box. (I’m currently writing this in SimpleText, which has problems of its own.) Can you say annoying?
I really hate it when applications look and feel like they were programmed in Java. It’s especially insulting when they aren’t, and when there are Java applications that have much better behavior!